


theater of the absurd

by yellow_caballero



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Asexual Character of Color, Canon Asexual Character, Hey What If All The Monsters Were Friends?, In Which The Worms Are Very Polite And Can Be Exchanged For Goods and Services, Jon isn't doing his best at all and it isn't very good either, M/M, Magical Realism, Martin is doing his best but his best isn't very good, Sasha is not sober for one second in this entire story, Tim is a genius of latte art, hits blunt let's dissect coffeeshop aus, takes place halfway through S1
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-24
Updated: 2019-12-24
Packaged: 2021-02-26 01:55:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 22,534
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21925552
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yellow_caballero/pseuds/yellow_caballero
Summary: Jon Sims, Barista, has everything he ever wanted: a boring coffee shop managerial position, a quirky friend group of disaffected 20somethings, and a will-they-or-won't-they with the village idiot.Jon Sims, Barista, does not exist.Jon Sims the Archivist has everything that doesn't exist: a job at a coffee shop full of horrors that wasn't there yesterday, a tip jar full of worms that seem to follow him, and a heteronormative capitalist future where happiness exists without effort.Jon Sims is dead. Long live Jon Sims. Long Live The Coffee Shop AU.
Relationships: Martin Blackwood/Jonathan Sims, Pre-Martin Blackwood/Jonathan Sims
Comments: 63
Kudos: 277





	theater of the absurd

**Author's Note:**

> Takes place midway through S1, and written over the course of listening to S1 and S2. There will be some aspects of characterizations and worldbuilding that's pure headcanon on my part, based off half a season's worth of knowledge and scattered spoilers, so if you run into inconsistencies (Jon's mother, Martin's past, timeline stuff, Sasha being a funny alcoholic), please assume that this is from a fun alternate universe. If you know me, then you know how much I love dissecting tropes and genres, so buckle in for that again. I have given up on writing anything for anybody else, so this is for me, but y'all can read it if you want.

Statement begins:

Jon woke up at 5:45 AM Monday morning with what, at the time, he assumed to be a head splitting hangover, despite the fact that he was not a known heavy drinker and could not recall partaking last night. It was possible that he had pulled down his favorite single malt scotch from the top shelf of his cabinets last night, as that was the only liqueur Jon allowed himself to occasionally indulge in, but when he checked the cabinet there didn’t seem to be any more whiskey missing in its glass bottle than there had been yesterday. It was a curious event, and as Jon threw up in the stained toilet he allowed himself to contemplate its mysteries, but by the time he spat up the last vestiges of vomit he decided it was nothing worth worrying about and made himself some oatmeal instead. 

He was just slinging his favorite leather bookbag over his shoulder and fixing his hair with the afro pick carefully hung next to his favorite aftershave when his phone buzzed with a text. This startled him more than anything else, as people didn’t text him. He enforced this rigorously. The last texts he had received from anyone were the worms typing out a fake calling in sick message from Martin. This was because worms weren’t intimidated by him. He pulled his phone out, squinting at the text. It was from Sasha. 

**Sasha:** Here

Jon blinked at the message, abruptly panicked. Had he arranged to do some research footwork with her today? It wasn’t like him to forget things. But it wasn’t like him to drink to the point of blacking out either. 

He stepped outside, and sure enough Sasha’s 2010 Volkswagen puttered in front of his house. She was behind the steering wheel, chugging a truly gigantic thermos of coffee, and Jon realized with a start that Tim and Martin were crowded in the backseat talking animatedly. He approached the car carefully, as if it was a live fence, or his mother. 

Jon knocked on the window, mouth open to demand how she even _got_ his address, and Sasha reached over and pushed the door open. “Get the fuck in, we’re going to be late.”

He got in. He wasn’t scared of Sasha and nobody would make him admit that. 

In the backseat, Tim and Martin appeared to be animatedly arguing over whether or not Marvel movies were still good (Martin was a Spider-man fan, Tim said that there hadn’t been any good Marvel movies since Black Panther). Sasha was driving with one hand and chugging coffee like a maniac. Jon wondered if he was dreaming. 

“The fuck is with that stupid bag?” Sasha grunted, sipping more coffee as she pulled into the street. The coffee smelled a little off. Rather...almost alcoholic. Was she day drinking? While driving? At 6:30 AM?

“It’s for work,” Jon hedged, clutching it tightly to his chest while attempting to make it look like it was not what he was doing. “It has my laptop and...things...how did you get my address?”

“Are you drunk?” Sasha demanded. She skidded the car somewhat dangerously, and it skidded on the wet asphalt. “And you didn’t share? You arse. You’re driving the carpool next week. You skipped your turn last time.”

“The Tony Stark plotline was really good, actually,” Martin was saying, overly enthusiastically. “His relationship with Peter was so heartwarming, and showed a lot of growth on his end -”

“I’m sick of every movie being about Tony Stark,” Tim shot back. “It’s time for a new age in superheroes.”

Carpool? Martin hadn’t left the Institute in weeks. He should know, he was doing his shopping for him. “Martin,” Jon said, fighting down irritability born of confusion. “What are you doing out of the Institute?”

“Did I miss a night shift?” Martin asked, panicked. Jon rolled his eyes and kneaded his forehead. “Did you schedule me for a night shift? Jon, you have to tell me these things. Did anybody else know I had a night shift?”

“You didn’t have a night shift, idiot,” Sasha said, almost soothingly. “Jon’s caught a bad case of dementia today. I think he’s drunk.”

“Without us?” Tim asked, wounded. 

“As if we’re friends?” Jon shot back, exhausted, still smelling somewhat of vomit, confused. 

“Touche,” Sasha said, skidding them through a red light and almost killing them all. 

  
  
  


They reached the Institute eventually, after an awkward car ride that would have been also awkwardly silent if it wasn’t for Martin’s insistence that Jon needed to know everything about some useless comic character. Except when they did reach the Institute, sandwiched between a law office and the London Zen Center and across the street from a very nice little neighborhood dog park, Jon couldn’t find the institute at all. 

It was called The Magnus Institute. That were the words on the sign. Except there was a chalkboard sign outside too, advertising ‘WARM UP WITH A HOT PUMPKIN LATTE £4’ in what looked suspiciously like Sasha’s handwriting. It was not a gorgeous three story Victorian building, but rather some mod catastrophe with too many windows and plush couches inside circling round tables. The others filed out, grumbling or rubbing their eyes or dragging aprons out of their bags, as Jon sat in the car seat with his mouth open wide, unable to believe what he was seeing. 

“If you aren’t coming out I’m locking you in the car like an unwanted baby,” Sasha said, and Jon quickly scrambled out. 

Everybody hovered around the door, looking at him expectantly, and Jon belatedly realized that they all seemed to work here. Including him. He stared at them back, uncertain of how to proceed. 

Tim looked at Martin. “If he’s too plastered to open up today does that mean we get to go home?”

“I think you left the keys in your fancy little satchel there, Jon,” Martin said encouragingly, smiling gently at him, and Jon silently dug around in his fancy little satchel only to draw out a ring of keys and a tacky looking apron with a nametag on it that proclaimed him manager. There was a sticker on his nametag that said ALLY. The fuck. 

He unlocked the door as Sasha took another swing from her extremely suspect thermos. Maybe he was still drunk. 

The coffee shop, because that was undoubtedly what it was, was small. There was a bar area at the front where patrons could sit on tall stools and complain about their lives or whatever the fuck it was patrons did at coffe shops, lots of tables with rickety chairs, comfortable couch areas, and it smelled strongly as if it hadn’t been mopped in a long time. Drunk on power as manager of the coffee shop, Jon told Martin to go mop. He did, cheerfully. The backroom was a mess, and Sasha and Tim were hard at work brewing new pots and bitching about whoever the fuck closed last night, and Jon promptly began turning the entire store upside down looking for whatever the fuck was going on. 

He logged onto a staff computer, fingers working by muscle memory to plug in his login, and scrolled through the staff clock-ins and clock-outs. There was months, years of reports. Pay stubs, disciplinary reports (all for Martin), employee commendations (all for Sasha). Health code records, certifications, Facebook pages for The Magnus Institute Coffee Shop - all there, all aboveboard. So much as The Magnus Institute had ever been above board. 

Looking closer at the break room white board, he saw that the owner of the shop was Elias, who apparently was on vacation and who placed everyone on strict orders not to call him unless the place was burning down. The white board had everyone’s shifts, written in what was unmistakably Jon’s handwriting, and even some pithy comments that were also in his handwriting. 

‘NOTICE: WILL EVERYONE (MARTIN) PLEASE STOP FEEDING THE RATS IN THE DUMPSTER OUTSIDE, THEY ARE BEGINNING TO TALK’. Who was beginning to talk?

‘NOTICE: CLEAN ESPRESSO MACHINE TWICE DAILY (SASHA)’

‘CARPOOL SCHEDULE: JONS TURN NEXT WEEK’

‘WILL EVERYONE (MARTIN) REMEMBER NOT TO MICROWAVE FISH IN THE BREAK ROOM!!!!’

Hm. Jon rubbed his chin, reading the notes. There were a few possibilities. 

He could still be sleeping. He could be so hung over he was hallucinating. Martin could have tripped and accidentally dumped hallucinogenic mushrooms in the actual break room coffee pot and Jon could currently in the real world be lying on the floor of the library in the Institute stoned off his mind. That was a possibility. 

Or he could be in an alternate universe where he was a barista. That was one possibility, albeit an unlikely one. The most likely answer was that this was just an imaginative dream, and that any minute now Jon would wake up and go to work in the Institute same as ever. 

It wasn’t that Jon didn’t believe that interesting things ever happened. He certainly knew basic truths of the world, like that witches exist and were sometimes host to a colony of evil worms, there were some books that held mystic and homicidal qualities, and that the world was flat. He went to college. He was an educated man. It was simply that, for every 10% of reports from the Institute that happend to be real, there were 90% that indicated that the testifier had seen Bigfoot popping into the local Tesco for a quick bikkie and some PG Tips. Which was ridiculous, obviously. Everybody knew that the Sasquatch was native to North America. Their constitutions didn’t do well in the Isles. 

He was a skeptic, and a rationalist, and far from a hypocrite. Jon would first exhaust all likely and mundane possibilities before moving onto the supernatural. The alternate world theory had yet to be proven, but it had also yet to be disproven. 

A worrying thought occurred to him, a memory of the Priest's testimony. He had seen one thing, but in real life something quite different had been happening to him. Jon merely hoped that in the real world he was not killing anybody and eating their face. One could never be sure about these things. 

Still, there had been warning signs. Strange events in the priest’s life, a supposedly demonic exorcism. Nothing interesting had been happening to Jon lately like...threats on his life...or an unfortunate worm infestation…

Hm. Jon tied his apron around his waist. He would go along with this, for now, so if there was a hypothetical evil entity controlling this then they wouldn’t know he was onto them. This was a perfectly manageable situation, by him, and would soon be managed very well, also by him. No need to involve the others. Alarming Martin was never any fun for anyone. 

“Opening time!” Sasha called from the front, and Jon walked out of the back room. Time to sling some beans. 

  
  


Just kidding. Jon had a bachelor’s in English and a master’s in Info Sciences. Despite the popular stereotype, he had never worked as a barista in his life and had no fucking idea how to work an espresso machine. He barely drank coffee himself, preferring crappy tea, and disdained the preppy overpriced coffee shops that had arrived from the States like an infection. 

But Sasha and Tim seemed to know what they were doing as they made the drinks, and Martin was cheerfully chatting up all of the bleary businessmen and women filing in with clouded and grimy eyes and leaving chugging coffee as if their lives depended on it. He fumbled all the change and needed the register explained to him a few times by an increasingly exasperated Sasha, but that was normal behavior for Martin. He still needed the filing system explained to him every other week, and he had been working at the Institute for years. 

Meanwhile, Jon flexed his management skills and loudly talked about how he needed to sort out the disastrous books and payrolls and shut himself up in the back as he quickly and efficiently goofed off and avoided any work. Hopefully he could keep this up for the rest of the day and, once he got off shift, go right the fuck to sleep and see what’s actually going on -

The landline next to him rung. 

Jon froze, staring at the cheap black landline and watching it buzz insistently. Tim poked his head into the back, frowning when he saw Jon stare at the landline as if it was going to bite him. 

“Aren’t you going to answer that, mate?”

Jon cautiously picked up the phone, unwilling to admit weakness to Tim of all people. “Erm - Magnus Institute. Jon speaking.”

On the other end of the line the connection crackled, and Jon heard the unmistakable sound of heavy breathing. Jon abruptly began sweating. The sound was a little...wet. 

“Who is this?” Jon asked. The heavy breathing seemed to grow louder, almost frenzied, then it hung out. Jon pulled the landline away from his ear, feeling very unsettled, and unwilling to acknowledge how his hand felt a little...sticky. 

“Who was it?” Tim asked, eyebrows raised. From behind him Sasha pushed her way through, muttering loudly about idiots who only ordered ten pounds of raw, bleeding steak. 

“They, erm, didn’t say. Just...heavy breathing.” Jon shivered. Sasha strode into the deep freezer, cussing louder and louder, and shortly came out again dragging a very large sealed paint bucket behind her, cursing up a storm. Jon wiped his hand on his apron, unsurprised when it came away slightly bloody. 

Tim nodded sagely, as if this made sense. “Ah. They’ll be wanting a six double order of coffee pronto, then. That place always caters its business meetings with us on Mondays.”

“Fantastic,” said Jon, not feeling fantastic at all, wondering where the blood had come from. “Erm, go and help out Sasha with the...twenty pounds of raw steak she’s lugging, won’t you?” 

“You got it, boss!” 

Despite himself, and because you didn’t end up working at the Magus Institute unless you had _some_ sense of raw curiosity that you really would be better off without, Jon stepped into the front behind the counter. The coffee shop had rapidly filled up, dead eyed people hunched over laptops or reading books or chatting. More than one person appeared to be the victim of a multilevel marketing scheme, looking terrified as they clasped cups of coffee as a vapid and brightly grinning person wearing a lot of decorative eyes around their body enthused about the beauty of their organization. Which all seemed to go unnamed. That really was a quite frankly tacky amount of eye jewelry. 

At the counter, Tim was helping Sasha lug the bucket on the counter. It smelled awful, and left traces of something unimaginable on the counter. The customer, who was virtually unseeable underneath the hoodie pulled tight over their head and the baggy jeans they were wearing, reached out and took the bucket of meat. As they stretched, a sliver of skin appeared where the hoodie was pulled back, and unmistakable open sores and rotting pus was dripping from its wrist. Martin, who was manning the counter, watched in sick fascination as the customer dug his hand into the bucket of meat, pulled up some raw chicken, and deposited it in the tip jar. Which was already filled almost to the brim with wiggling worms. 

The customer shuffled off, bucket dragging behind him, as Jon stared open mouthed at the departing figure and the next person in line shuffled up to Martin and gave their order. Without opening his mouth or saying anything, the person gave the indescribable impression that they wanted a scone. 

“Coming right up,” Martin said cheerfully, pressing random buttons at the register. “Say, dreadful weather we’re having, innit? All cloudy and cold out. When’ll spring come around again, eh? Would you like that heated?”

The customer gave the unmistakable impression that they wanted their scone heated up. 

“Very good, then! Catch the latest episode of Doctor Who, have you? I was up late watching it, I’m such a huge fan. Have you ever seen it?”

The customer somehow gave off the air that they hadn’t. 

“Oh, you really ought to. Lots of fun, if you like low budget sci fi. Which I do, obviously! That’ll be two quid, and your name, please?”

The customer passed over the money and gave their name. It sounded a little like Rick, or Mick, or something.

“Bang on, then. I’ll call your name when it’s ready. Have a good one!”

The customer shambled off, and Martin greeted the next customer with a smile just as bright. Jon didn’t know which was weirder: the unmistakably somewhat vampiric customer, or how unbelievably obnoxious Martin was as a cashier. 

If vampires were real. Which they weren’t. Every werewolf Jon had ever met had assured him personally that vampires weren’t real, and that the prospect was ridiculous. 

Quickly, before they could start climbing out of the jar, Jon grabbed the tip jar full to bursting with worms and whisked it out the back, opening the door to the back alley where the garbage was and dumping them on the ground, stomping them thoroughly until they all died. They never warned about this in the barista school. Or maybe they did. He hadn’t gone. 

When he came back, he was treated to the sight of Sasha yelling at a customer who was wearing a truly improbable number of raincoats and who smelled something terrible. Tim and Martin were holding their noses, as Sasha yelled at the customer to either take their raincoats off or leave. 

“ - and I am not giving you the key to the bathroom unless you buy something,” Sasha yelled. When she saw Jon come in she turned around, obviously relieved. “Sir, here’s my manager. He’ll tell you the exact same thing I am. No shirt, no shoes, fifty raincoats, no service.”

“Is that really in the rulebook?” Jon asked. 

“Obviously. It’s not even raining for once.” Sasha crossed her arms at the short, raincoat sodden figure, and growled at him. “Off or out.”

The figure grumbled and bitched under its breath, but steadily took off its raincoat. Then another one. Then another one. Another raincoat, falling to the floor. Yet another raincoat. Finally, the final layer was peeled away, and a dead rat lay on the floor. 

Sasha made a show out of pinching her nose. “That’s the fifth one this month. Martin, throw that shit away.”

“Aw, why do I gotta do it?”

“Jon said so.”

“I did?” Jon asked. 

“Aw, okay,” Martin said dejectedly, stepping away from the counter and grabbing the mop. The maybe-maybe-not vampire customer stopped over the dead rat and, in an awful flash of movement, slurped it up with its prehensile tongue. “Oh, there we go, problem fixed.”

“Hm,” Jon said, hating this. “I’ll just - be in the back if you need me.”

“Wait for me,” Sasha said, brandishing her thermos of what Jon was now sure was spiked coffee. 

So that’s how Jon and Sasha huddled in front of the walk-in freezer and traded swings of Irish coffee as Martin cheerfully did a horrible job cashiering and Tim flexed his truly improbable bean slinging skills. Occasionally Tim poked his head in and let them both know that the bathroom was full of meat _again,_ which Jon told Tim to make Martin take care of, but mostly he and Sasha effectively skived off work until she felt too guilty and tipsy to keep drinking and she pulled herself upwards, shaking her head and re-tying her apron. 

“I know how much you hate this job, Jon,” Sasha said, stumbling slightly until Jon sighed. He batted her hands away and tied her apron strings himself, politely ignoring her grateful smile. “Why don’t you just quit?”

Backstory for the made up coffee dream. Jon just shrugged uncomfortably, knowing she expected an answer but bad at coming up with lies on the spot. In the end, he went with something that was a little true. “What job is fun? I don’t feel like I can get anything better.”

“That’s your problem,” Sasha argued back, despite the fact that Jon most decisively did not want to be told what his problems were when he already was aware of far too many. “You’re afraid of losing stability in search for anything better. You’re afraid to open yourself up to happiness in case it doesn’t pay off. I can’t tell what you’re more afraid of, Jon, being sad or actually being happy for once.”

“If this is _yet another_ ridiculous attempt to find me a girlfriend -”

“It doesn’t have to be a girlfriend!” Sasha said, as if every well meaning ‘friend’ Jon had ever made had been convinced that he wouldn’t be sad anymore if he just started paying attention to his genitalia. “Just anyone to open up to will work, mate. Just think about it.”

Sure. Coded talk for, ‘find someone to have sex with Jon, you’ll loosen up’. Jon knew people, who were all the same all the time and never did or said things differently. His grad program had a pot going. 

But it was, despite everything, the kind of thing a friend would say, or the kind of concern a friend would show, and Jon and Sasha were not friends. They were coworkers, and Jon liked to think that they were friendly, but Jon had never made it his goal in life to be best buddies with everybody who crossed his path. People usually turned out to be jerks, or bigots, or a living colony to a malevolent hive. Nothing in the world was benign, despite what Jon liked to believe, ordinary people least of all. Jon had an active social life on library science online forums, and that was all he needed. 

Distantly, on the intercom over the shitty and somewhat disturbing coffee shop, ‘Pretty Fly For A White Guy’ started playing. This was why, and for no other reason, Jon decided to stay alone in the back a little longer. 

  
  
  


When he finally did venture out, the cafe seemed to have died down with the passing of the breakfast rush. It was now occupied solely by barnacles clutching onto the eaves and corners, students hunched over laptops and what looked like three talking dogs having a serious business meeting, complete with graphs and complementary bones. 

Worryingly, the MLM hun/cultist still seemed to be monologing at the terrified young person. Jon sighed, sticking his hands in his apron pocket and stealthily stepping closer to the table. The victim silently begged Jon for help with their eyes, and Jon wondered if he would recognize their name from a long list of testimonials. It was none of his business. He wasn’t in the business of improving other’s lives, or his own. 

He tapped the cultist/hun/same thing on the shoulder, not bothering to smile politely. He didn’t have anything approximating a customer service voice, so he just settled for the low drawl he used for transcriptions. “Sir. I’m afraid that our establishment has a clear rule against solicitation on the premises. I’ll have to ask that you conduct your business somewhere else.”

The cultist looked like a normal middle aged woman, except she was decked out in a startling array of eye themed clothing - leggings with eyes, t-shirt with one large eye, and eye jewelry. She scowled at Jon. “I didn’t see no sign.”

“It’s right behind the counter,” Jon said smoothly. On cue, both the cultist/hun and the victim looked behind the counter, where Martin was hurriedly scribbling on a piece of paper with a washable marker ‘NO CULTS OR SCAMS PLEASE’. He held it up proudly, grinning broadly with gap teeth. “There you have it. If you don’t leave promptly I’m afraid I’ll have to call the Yard.”

“M̮̪̟̠̰̝̼̗͓͒̿̐̋̅̐͆͘̕͘ͅy̨̧̨̜͈͖͇̰͆̊̎̓̊̆̃͂̏̑͜͜ ̡͖̮̬̙̥̰̥̙̱͒̔͋̈́̈͑̀̓͠p̳̭̯̘̻̻͙͍̜̻̒́̓́͑͗͐͂̚̕ơ̼͙̠͇̭̬̪̹̺͈̋̂̑̐̾̿͗̎͝ẃ̧̫̲͙̬͎̜͕̳̲́̊̾̔͒̉͠͠ḛ̘̩̼̼̘̗͖̣̙͒̃͑̌̌͗̅͘̕͝r̦̝̰͔̫̭͚̲͉͕̄̃͗̅̈́͐̿̅͘͠ ̳̟͍͕̪̩͔̗͚̜̇̆̓͐̑̾̎̌͆͝i̗̙͕͙͙̭̫̗̹̻͂̊̒͂̍̂̂̑͛s̮̲͔͎͎̤̱̠͎̈́́̾̆̇̔̔͝͝͠ͅ ̧̗̬̮͓̤͈̼̗̹̋̀͒̍̈́̈́͌͋͘f͎̳̼̣̝̗̺͕͎͌͐̏̉͐̑̓̽̄͐͜ǎ̧͍̜̬͚̼̠̱̰͕̓́̇̉͂̿̐̆̈́r̨̛̺̭͉̦̪̳̤̜̾́̉͑́̐͛͋͘͜ ̩̱̤͖̪͓̼̪͓̮̇͛̋̃͒̅̈́̉͑̾g͚̱̼͍̣͕̘̦̬̯͊͐̂̐̽̑̈́̀͠͝r̡͓̤̮̬̝̝̖͍̪̊̐̉͆̈̃̔͝ḙ͙̖͕̹̪̯͇̹̱͗̈̓͋̈́̈́̂͒͋̓ȧ̡̞̳̻̠͈͎̱̠͋̍̊͛̓͌͜͝͝t̢̰̜̦̲̫͉̣͕͉̽̅͑̃͋̿͗͑̉͝ê̺̘̱̪̘̦̪̫͆̃̒̋̔͆͘̕͝ͅͅr͖̜̙̬̭͉͓̫̻̃̂̎́̓̈́̆̀ͅ ̢̡̜̭̩̠͍͙̼͆̈́̒̃͗̽͌̅̐͘͜t̫͚̖͔̹̭͇̹̭̋̍͐̐̉͆͘̕͘ͅh̡͚͙͓̳̠͙͖̤̏͗̾̋̆̏̽̂̕͝ͅa̛̻̮̫̺̞̖̜͕̘̎͛͊̄͌̚̚͘͜n̳͉̗̜͚̦̼̳̖̮̒́̍̎̃̓̉̉̀͗ ̢̦̲̬̱͕̪̠̰̖̿̈́̋̈́̒͒̐̋͛̕ḛ̢̧̞̻̝͓̪͖͉͑̊̍͋͑͌̒́́v̬̜̮̹͔̖̰̬͚͑̓̉̎̓̏͑͘̚͠ͅê̳̺̥̭͙̟̼̼͛̀̂̔̓͆̓͜͠͠ͅn͇̝͓̬̖̹̹̲͖͒̆̈́̾̑́͐̀͘͜͠ ̨̪̫̯͉͕̲̬͖̜̓͆̆̐̊̌̑͗̓͠t̨͎͖̺̪̱̮͚̻̭̐̃̉̆͆͋̋̓̚͠ḩ̡̘̝̘̬̜̰͓͎̈́̑̌͒̉̅̄ę̩̝̦̦̮̤͉̳̏̆͆͛̔̾̌̉̎͝ͅ ̧̺̫̬̪͈̩̞͎͒̉͂̅̈́̈̎͑̚͜A͉̞̹̹̮͎̖͔̲̾͒̓̈̍͐͂̏̔͜ṙ̡̗̥͙͓̹̲͕͇͓̒̾̂̃͑̊̓̕c̡͓̞͉̻̭̫͕͍̀́͗̋̊͑͆̈̕ͅh̤͈̜̺̠̻̺͖͔̔̐̾̏̓̇̆͘̕͝ͅi͖̹̦͇̣̩̱̣̖̱̋̐̃͐͌̒͗́̅͘v̨͈̯̯͖̞͉̖̰̱̾̈́̉͐͆͊̂̍͋̂i̘̖̪̖͓͕̻̦̣̼̒͂͐̊̈̃͊̈͘̚s̢̲̤̗̠̹̦̜̮̰͛͗̈́͌̊̀̃̽͘͝ţ̛̩͚̪͇̱͓̮̖̓̈́͌̎͗͐͐̽̕ͅ ̯̞̙̩͚͉͈̪͖̺̄̐͒̀̎͗̓͘͠c̲̻͚͈̻̺͔̟̣̔̔͐͋̇̿͌̄͗͜â͖̤̮͕̮͈̱̪̜͚̿͗̒̊̌̌̅̈́͋n̢̢̘̝͔̱͉̳̤͙̎͑̿̈́̿̓̽̔͌̚ ̢͈̟̘̟̭̞͇͍̻̀̈́̀͋̊̅̕͠͠͠b̢̢̧̬̝̗̟͙͔̏͌̄̔̓͊̚͘͝ͅȩ̻̤̥̪͙̜͖̖̂̂́̍͗̅͛̄͘͜͝h̝͖̘̫̟̳͓̗͂̄͌̔̐̐͆̈́̕̚͜͜ơ̢̡͕̜̲̗̜̜͚̐̓̓̌̐̔̅́͒ͅļ̧̛̫̫̺̟̳̲̱͕̀̈́͐͐̀̓̾̿̕d̠̘̼͉̖̬̺̪̪̑̄̒̈̊̔͊̃̚͝ͅ ̡̡̯̯͔̰̠̹̮̝̽̄͂̒͛̈́͂͝” hissed the cultist, from behind far too many teeth. 

“Ma’am, I’m going to call the Yard,” Jon said, bored and unafraid of death.

The cultist left, hissing at him with too many teeth, and Jon waved as she left. The victim was left shaking, and Jon gave him some hot chocolate on the house before sending him off. He wiped his hands on his apron, a job well done. From behind the counter Martin clapped enthusiastically, and Tim rolled his eyes and he drew another scone out of the warmer.

Jon even managed to, through extensive observation and note taking, realize how to work the espresso machine. As Tim took his own break, drawing out his phone and playing some sort of phone game that involved the buzzing of a thousand flies, Jon leaned against the counter and practiced making espresso as he did something for the first time in his life: voluntarily talk to Martin. 

“ - and so far I’ve been paid in meat, eye talismans, gravestones, and the time and date of my death? I don’t think that’s legal tender in England. What do I do?”

“Just take it, I guess.” Jon delicately nibbled at a Jaffa Cake he found in a secret cabinet in the kitchen. He thought maybe they were Sasha’s, but she was probably too drunk to care. “I think the time and date of your death is worth more than four quid, honestly.”

“I don’t know if Elias will like this,” Martin fretted. “I keep on trying to establish boundaries and assert myself, you know, like you’re so good at, but I’m not much good at it at all. I’d rather just make friends with them, you know? I don’t want to make enemies with anybody who hands me a fragment of my gravestone.”

“Let me worry about Elias,” Jon said, who was trying not to worry about Elias. “Just, erm, do your best, Martin.” Wait, fuck, he was trying to fish for information. He had forgotten all about in his awkward attempts to emotionally support Martin. Last time he did _that._ “What do we normally do...about all of this?” He waved his hand vaguely, as if that was descriptive. 

“How am I supposed to know?”

“Don’t you work here?”

“Oh, yeah, guess I do.” Martin laughed awkwardly. “But you’re the manager and all, so shouldn’t you know?”

“I try not to micromanage,” Jon said defensively. 

They both stared at each other for a second. 

“How long have you been working here, Martin,” Jon asked. 

“I’unno,” Martin said vaguely, eyes nervous flitting to the worms in the tip jar. “How long have _you_ been working here?”

As if on cue, a bedraggled woman in a ripped silk dress and patchy black hair who could only be Jane Prentiss lumbered up to the counter. Worms rippled beneath her eyes. She gargled something indistinguishable. 

“Welcome to The Magnus Institute, ma’am, how may I help you?” Martin said pleasantly. His smile was tight, and his eyes kept flicking to the worm poking its way out from under her fingernail. 

Jane Prentiss gargled something again, with a strange sputtering. 

“Small espresso? Coming right up.”

She held out a hand and a small stream of worms dripped onto the counter. 

“Oh, no, this one’s on the house,” Martin said, faux cheerfully. “No need to pay for this one. You’re a very valued patron here.”

Jane Prentiss gargled something else and the worms slid back into her hand. A few crawled into the tip jar. She lumbered away, falling onto the couch and promptly decomposing on it. Jon and Martin watched her go. 

“Do you ever feel as if you’re about to die any second?” Martin asked. “Or, perhaps, that you’re already dead, and that you haven’t noticed? That you aren’t meant to be alive, but you aren’t meant to be quite dead either, so you don’t know what you are? And that one day you’ll wake up and that the universe will have noticed the inherent wrongness of you, the inherent unsuitability of you to fill up any space, and that it’ll reject you as thoroughly as it always should have? And that you’ll no longer belong anywhere?”

“Why don’t you go on break,” Jon said. “I’ll get Sasha to man the counter.”

“Yeah, sounds good,” Martin said, untying his apron. “I’m not saying that this is any better than sitting all night in the basement of the Institute, but it’s definitely a little weirder. Which is saying quite a bit, don’t you think?”

“Wait,” Jon said, brain still struggling to understand the previous oddly poetic monologue and the sheer incongruity of it coming from the village idiot Martin, “this building doesn’t have a basement.”

“Oh, doesn’t it?” Martin laughed awkwardly and stiffly. “My bad! Break time!”

He ran away, not bothering to hide it, and Jon decided to go to the bathroom. 

The bathroom looked like every bathroom Jon had ever been in, thoroughly unremarkable in its tacky yet bland decoration and uncomfortably sticky floors. There was a single worm crawling under one of the stalls, and Jon decided to let it poop in peace. He settled instead for looking at himself in the mirror. 

He had been expecting something strange about his reflection, something off or different. Eyes swimming with storm clouds, teeth falling out, blood dribbling out of the corner of his mouth, whatever. But instead all he got was himself, which was somehow far more terrifying. 

His hair, a short natural hair in tight curls, tapering to a fade with a close cropped beard to complement it. Dark brown eyes, permanently rimmed by bags, and thin lips with a stark nose. He was ‘intimidatingly tall’, as described by many, along with ‘unhealthily skinny’. He looked nothing like Martin, who was short and fat and Chinese and perpetually cheerful, or Sasha, who was curvy and Cuban with little tolerance for bullshit, or Tim, who was Korean and tall and relaxed yet confident. 

He looked at himself in the mirror, and was struck by a strange dysphoria. This man was not him. He was somebody else, somebody who looked and talked and scowled much like Jon had always been told he did, but there was something unforgivably seperate about him. There had to be something about Jon that was different than this man in the mirror, something that was himself that could not be seen or identified, some invisible marker that made him Jon. But he could not find it, and he poked and prodded at himself in an effort to find some invisible link between his body and himself. 

Was this him? Was this all that he was? This man who looked like he needed more sleep? He felt so disconnected from his body that he almost wanted to rebel against it, wanted to scratch himself out. Jon had never paid much attention to bodies, his or anybody else’s, and did not know how to quantify them in a way that made sense. 

Something tickled one of his senses, and he sharply turned around only to find a worm waiting politely behind him. Waiting to use the sink. To wash his...hands?

“Oh,” Jon said lamely, “sorry.”

He moved aside, and watched the worm gently scrunch itself all the way to the wall, climbing up onto the sink, laboriously turning the handle and merrily bathing itself under the harsh spray before turning the handle back and inching itself closer to the paper towel dispenser. 

“Ah, let me,” Jon said, scrunching the lever and pulling out a paper towel. He laid it in front of the worm, who merrily rolled around on it, before scrunching its way back underneath the door and back to whatever kind of wormy life it lead. 

He stared at the mirror again, fully aware of how somewhat strung out he looked. 

“I don’t know who I am,” Jon said, testing the words out. “Or where I am. Well. I guess I’m technically in a bathroom. But, like, metaphysically. Or emotionally.”

His reflection didn’t say anything back - but then, he was afraid that it would. 

  
  
  
  


Jon was, at heart, a problem solver. Sometimes his friends came to him to vent about their issues and they got mad at him when he tried to help them solve their problems. He also had the kind of orderly and methodical mind that was perfect for a Head Archivist and refused to let this confusing coffee shop be the death of him. So he broke the problem down into steps, scribbled on a notepad as he bent over the computer as he avoided doing real work, and put his plan into action. It was now past lunch, people were beginning to trickle back in as they were released from work, and he didn’t want to spend a single minute here longer than he had to. 

Step 1: Gather information. 

According to the computer, he had been working at this coffee shop approximately as long as he had been working at the Institute. He had been promoted to Manager at about the same time that he had been ‘promoted’ to Head Archivist, and interestingly enough Gertrude Robinson had died at the same time. He didn’t know what an elderly woman was doing working at a coffee shop, but maybe she was a pensioner. 

Moreover, all of the cases that he could remember off the top of his head had still happened. The case of the serial killer who collected hearts, the priest, every myriad disappearance and death. The historical events also seemed to line up. World Wars 1, 2, and 3 had all happened at about the same time as they did in the real world. Even the Earth was, reassuringly, still flat. 

The reports seemed like they were written by him. He knew his writing style and his narrative voice, and they were his without a doubt. He read through some of the disciplinary reports for Martin and was self-aware enough to recognize that he was the only person who would add to the end of a disciplinary report for an employee who accidentally overslept his shift: “please fire him I cannot stand one more second of this.”

Step 2: Exhaust All Other Possibilities. 

He pinched himself. He read an employee training manual, which just seemed to be increasingly archaic latin interspersed with corporate buzzwords. He had read somewhere once that in dreams you couldn’t read, because the reading center of your brain was asleep or something, whatever, he wasn’t a neurologist. He called his mother, who yelled at him for being a layabout, thirty years old and still working at that coffee shop! He hung up on his mother. He double checked the internet to make sure that the actual, real life Magnus Institute didn’t exist. It did not. Jonah Magnus existed, but apparently he was just an entrepreneur with no interest in the supernatural and a very definite interest in hedge fund management. Jon _still_ had a BA in English and an MS in Info Science. Ha, ha. 

Step 3: Recruit Some Allies. 

Hard pass. 

Step 4 -

Okay, okay, he had no other ideas. He had sworn not to let onto anybody that he was onto whatever demon was probably manipulating him into eating faces in the real world, but he was bored and tired of making espresso and out of ideas. This job was even worse than being Head Archivist, because at least there he wasn’t forced to be polite to people. 

More importantly, he still felt in his right mind, and he knew how important that was. His thinking wasn’t muddled, he wasn’t confused or compulsed. It honestly felt like a normal day, except he still had a slight headache and a fuzzy mouth, and he was a barista. Jon repeated this to himself very frequently, because he was terrified that he was secretly eating somebody’s face right now. Not terrified. _Mildly concerned._

He considered his options carefully. Normally, he would go straight to Sasha, who had a ruthless practicality about her and also habitually kept a bottle of mace shoved in her bag. But she was clearly more than a little drunk, and Jon was worried that she might try to convince him to get laid or something to deal with the tension, so she was right out. Tim was another thought, except that every time Jon tried to talk to him, Tim was busy doing five things at once, because he was the only employee bothering to do any work today besides Martin. Martin was also right out, because come on. That left - 

Nobody. 

Martin it was. 

Out of everybody here, why was it Martin he always turned to? Martin who he liked talking to the most, even though he hated him, Martin who he felt intrinsically as if he could trust the most? Jon refused to acknowledge this or analyze it, and shoved it very deep into a dark recess of his mind where he never had to think about it. 

He found Martin still on break, or maybe on another break, sitting at a table and staring out the window at the passerby. The area wasn’t high on foot traffic, for London anyway, and it was somewhat of a surprise that they had as many patrons as they did. He had a cup of cooling coffee on the table, next to a slightly-nibbled biscuit, and seemed to be thinking deeply about something. 

Jon slid into the chair across from him, ignoring the way he started and almost spilled his coffee. “Martin, I have not been entirely honest with you.”

“Really?” Martin asked, shocked and somewhat afraid. “If this is what you’re like when you’re honest, what are you _really_ thinking about me?”

“What? What, no, not about that. Our relationship is irrelevant here.”

Martin’s eyes grew very big and his lip, no shit, wobbled slightly. “It is?”

“It’s irrelevant in every situation, at all times,” Jon snapped. “Listen, something is terribly wrong.”

Martin shot him a skeptical look. “Look, I was concerned about the worms too, but I saw one fill out a customer survey and it gave me very glowing reviews.”

“Wrong in the metaphysical sense,” Jon stressed. “Martin, I do _not_ work in a coffee shop. I am _not_ your manager. I am the Head Archivist of The Magnus Institute, and I study the proliferation and recorded instances of supernatural occurrences in the United Kingdom. I’ve never touched an espresso machine in my life before today. Something is _incredibly_ wrong, and you have to help me.”

Martin stared at him. He slowly sipped his coffee. Jon tapped his fingers on the cheap linoleum, increasingly frustrated. 

Finally, Martin slowly said, “You know, I was very surprised and more than a little alarmed when I woke up this morning in my flat this morning with a splitting headache instead of in the basement of The Magnus Institute.”

Jon’s jaw dropped. In retrospect, very stupidly. 

“I very much had a minor heart attack,” Martin continued, tapping his fingernail on the coffee cup thoughtfully. “Then I spent like twenty minutes scouring my flat for worms. I thought that maybe this was some intricate, mind game plot of Jane Prentiss’, you know? But then I got a text from Sasha saying that he was here, and Tim started complaining about this job that we all apparently now had...so I decided to roll with it, because I was afraid that the worms might eat me if I disagreed...I know I don’t have much of a survival instinct but no better time than the present to grow one, right? When you acted somewhat confused too I thought that maybe you might remember out actual lives too, and that we could work together to fix this...but then you didn’t really say anything so I was like, ah, must just be me then. No problem. Ol’ Martin can fix this.” Martin took a deep, shuddering breath, tongue almost tripping in his ceaseless rambling. “So today’s been a little strange, yeah. I probed Sasha and Tim but I really do think they’re very convinced that they’re baristas. Is that what you wanted to talk about?” Something clearly occurred to Martin. “What if we’re from two different universes and we’re just intersecting in this one? What if you’re not the Jon I know? Quick, say something Jon would say.”

“Oh, do shut up, Martin,” Jon said. 

“Okay, it’s you.” Martin sipped at his coffee again. “So what’s the plan, boss? I really don’t get one. I’ve been kind of busy serving coffee all day. The way you were holed up in the back, you know, I figured that if you _did_ remember you must be cooking up a real good plan. Let’s hear it, then.”

Ah. 

“Of course there’s a plan,” Jon bluffed quickly. “The plan is to...to...to be clear, suicide is a last resort, right?”

“Death isn’t the worst thing that can happen to you,” Martin said cheerfully, “but unless you’re willing to deal with the psychic kickback of experiencing the loss of identity, it’s best as a last resort, yeah.”

“Great, just wondering.” Jon thought hard, recalling every case file that he could remember, trying to think of an incident that seemed similar to this one. “The most obvious answer is that this is some kind of group hallucination caused by some sort of trickster entity,” Jon said slowly. “I’ve been thinking about that case with the priest all day. Remember, the cannibal? Hallucinations, distortions of consciousness, and manipulations are all relatively common things to happen to people.”

“My consciousness doesn’t feel that distorted,” Martin pointed out, “but you can never tell, really.”

“Likewise. It’s possible that I am just _such_ a rational that attempted distortions of consciousness don’t work on me. After all, I am more intelligent than most of the Institute’s patrons,” Jon mused. 

“Oh, definitely,” Martin agreed. “You’re really a cut above the rest, Jon.”

“Thank you, Martin. Anyway, it’s best to keep our wits about us. Don’t eat or drink anything offered to you, in case it’s like the pomegranate offered to Persephone in the Underworld -” Martin put his coffee down very quickly. “And try not to make any sudden movements. The number one priority is escaping and making sure that we aren’t trapped in this Lotus Eater Machine forever.”

“Good plan, good goal setting,” Martin fervently agreed, pushing the coffee away. “Except, correct me if I’m wrong, but aren’t Lotus Eater Machines supposed to be your fantasy? I don’t think it’s either of our heart’s desires to work at a somewhat mystical coffee shop.”

It was a good point, and Jon hated that Martin had brought it up. “Maybe we’re in hell then,” he drawled, “I don’t know. We shouldn’t talk any longer, we never know what’s listening.”

“My idea of hell isn’t working as a barista,” Martin said, somewhat distressed. “I’m finding it quite fun, actually. Like, this isn’t what I want to do for the rest of my life, but as a low stress and low effort job it’s not bad. So long as you have a good workplace culture you can get through anything, you know?”

Jon did not know, and he did not want to know, and he quickly mumbled some platitudes at Martin about keeping his eyes peeled and escaped the table. Martin tended to both put him at ease and panic him, in a disconcerting way that he didn’t quite know what to do with, and that he somewhat resented. 

But he couldn’t stop thinking about his words, even as he avoided doing real work for the rest of the day. It was true that he felt objectively less threatened for his life then he did in his actual job. It was even a bit more interesting. He got more sunlight, had a little bit more social interaction. Sasha and Tim seemed to be cheerful and loose instead of stressed and hurrying. He got more exercise, got to walk around and stretch a little bit. It was...maybe it was a little bit nicer than his actual job. He spent most of his actual job kinda creeped out, actually. The only thing that kept him sane was fervent denial of absolutely everybody’s life experiences. 

However, by the end of his shift, he was no closer to a true plan and much closer to a panic attack. The more panicked he became the more he assured Martin that he had absolutely everything under control, which panicked Jon more because he felt very bad lying out of his ass to Martin, which made it more difficult to think, which made it more difficult to think of a plan, which necessitated more lying to Martin. It was a vicious cycle and Jon ruthlessly repressed his growing despair by volunteering to pick up more pastries from the walk-in freezer and refilling the display case. 

There was a full graveyard inside the walk-in freezer, heavy with ice-cold mist, every headstone bearing his name. He walked back out, without pastries, and told Tim that they were out. 

Finally, after an evening that dragged like molasses, it was time to clock out. Sasha and Tim chatted easily as Martin quietly dumped the rest of the tip jar worms into the loamy Earth, and Jon sighed and removed his apron. What a waste of a day. He desperately hoped this wasn’t one of those ‘hour inside day outside’ situations. He didn’t have _that_ much PTO. Maybe his brain waves were being harvested by an infernal machine. Maybe he had watched too much Dr Who last night. Martin could never know that they had something in common. 

But when by the time he had shrugged on his coat and stepped outside with the others, Martin and Tim picking up their argument from the morning as if no time had passed at all, there was a man waiting just outside the door. He was white, tall and well built with bright blonde hair, and was wearing a sharp black overcoat with one hand stuck in its pockets and the other holding one of their coffees. He was sipping it slightly, letting the biting wind tousle his hair, and shot a glance at Jon as he walked out. It was this glance that froze Jon where he stood, that made ice trickle down his spine. 

“Oh second thought,” Jon said to Sasha, who was twirling her keys around her finger. “I’ll take the Underground home.”

“Are you sure?” Sasha asked. “It’s out of the way.”

The man, hauntingly familiar, smiled at Jon. “I’m sure,” Jon said. “Are you even good to drive?”

“Please. That drink was spiked with Five Hour Energy, not vodka. I can go for miles.”

“It was spiked with _what_?”

“Bye, Jon,” Tim called, waving. “See you tomorrow!”

Martin pantimited a cell phone, mouthing ‘call me’. 

Sasha just shrugged. “Whatever, nerd. See you tomorrow.”

“See you tomorrow,” Jon said numbly, and watched them pile into the car and drive away. 

He stood next to the man, feeling an odd sense of companionship from him. There was something faintly familiar about him, but he couldn’t decide if he had seen him before in his real life or if he had merely been hugging the corners of the coffee shop all day, sitting in a secluded table without moving or drinking for eight hours straight. He thought it might be the latter. He was worried it may be both. 

“Come, Jon,” Preppy Guy said, “let’s take a walk.”

“I’m not in the habit of taking walks with strangers,” Jon said frostily. 

Preppy Yet Mysterious Guy flashed a quick smile at him, so lopsided and cunning it was closer to a smirk. “Nor with friends either, I understand.”

It was true, but Jon decided not to dignify it with a response. His sense of self-preservation had jumped through the window ten minutes ago, and all he was left with was a particular kind of bone-tired ache and fuzzy cotton stuffed through his eardrums. He felt oddly sleepy, and rather sedated. Some hard, calloused outer shell of his had cracked, and he felt vulnerable and stretched thin inside. Like egg yolk, or viscera.

He walked down the cracked pavement next to the man, jumping at shadows. The Magnus Institute - both research building and coffee shop - was tucked in a relatively sleepy residential district of Chelsa, but it wasn’t long before they turned onto a busier street lined with gentrified shops, fad CBD oil pop-up cafes, and high scale restaurants. Preppy and perfect couples walked their purebred dogs, and businessmen in suits power walked down the streets of London. It was rush hour, and the streets were heavy and crowded, but somehow the noise and bustle of cars and voices seemed far away. 

“Tell me, Jon,” the man said, “what do you think is the scariest thing in the world?”

“My mother after a few beers,” Jon said glibly. “Are you going to tell me your name and why you’ve trapped me in a hell dimension or am I just going to have to guess?”

“My name is Mike. I hope that’s familiar. I understand we have a mutual friend.” It was, unfortunately, and Jon fought to keep his face neutral. “And while I understand how terrifying you find your mother to be - have you seen a psychiatrist about that? - it’s not quite the answer I was looking for. Tell me, Jon. What’s scarier than spiders? Than spiders or ghosts or rhythmic thumping or tight caves or vampires or high spaces? What’s scarier than the prospect of a world without a god, a world without meaning, a world that is destined to collapse in on itself within twenty years due to Climate Change? What do you think is even scarier than that?”

“I get the feeling you’re about to tell me.”

“Scarier than that,” Mike said, almost quietly, as they walked slowly through the crowded streets of Chelsea, “is the prospect of waking up every day. Of making breakfast every day. Of packing your lunch for work every day. Of driving through congested traffic every day. Of sitting down at your desk, of saying your ‘hello’s and ‘how are you’s and ‘how’s the wife’s every day. Of thumping away at a keyboard or a tape recorder until it’s time to go home. Of sitting in your easy chair, in a dark flat all by yourself, watching nature documentaries. Of jacking off to bizzare porn. Every day. Of taking a shower and feeling the discontent and malaise creep up on you, the negative feelings you fight so hard to repress, pulling the shower curtain back and exposing you whole. Every day. Of falling asleep, damp and discontent, turning in your sleep, and dreaming vague dreams of nothing much. Every day. For...how old are you, Jon, thirty? For fifty more years. Then you die. And that’s it. That’s all you have. Is anything scarier than that, Jon?”

Jon was silent. 

“They say that you’ll have things that make it worth it,” Mike said, almost cheerfully. “The wife, the children. The vacations. The man den. The late nights drinking with your buddies. Except you don’t have any of those things, do you, Jon? You know you’ll never marry. You’re too fucked up for that. Nobody would ever want to marry somebody like you, somebody who can never love them the way they love you. You know you’re incapable of love, so you know you don’t want children either. Maybe if you’re lucky you can get a cat, but you’re allergic. A dog, maybe? No, but you’re never home long enough to exercise it. It’s not like you have any buddies to invite out drinking or to your man den, and you keep telling yourself that you don’t need them. Maybe you’re even right. And forget about vacations. You live for work, don’t you, Jon? Or maybe you just live _to_ work. You’ll never have the perfect life that society promised. You’ll spend the rest of your life filling it up with meaningless things - animals, objects, highs - to cover the empty hole that society dug in you, where a spouse and child were supposed to go. Then one day you’ll retire, except you’ll have no grandchildren to make your final days worthwhile, and without work you won’t know what to do with yourself. You’ll sit in your flat, or your nursing home, and waste away slowly. They’ll find your body when the smell starts bothering the neighbors. Your parents will be long gone. You have no siblings. No friends. Who will miss you when you die, Jon? Who’s life, in the fifty more years you’re obliged to trudge through, will you make meaningful? Not even your own. Tell me, Jon. Is there anything scarier than that?”

Jon didn’t say anything. They walked in silence for a few more minutes, and it took way longer than he would like to admit before he realized that he was crying. Hot tears were running down his face, burning and wet, and he quickly wiped them away on his coat sleeve before Mike noticed. 

Because it was true. Every bit of it was true. He had thought every single one of those words to himself, as if Mike had plucked them straight out of his mind, and he knew that it was his future. It was humiliating to admit: that even someone as fucked up as Jon wanted, that even someone as misanthropic as himself was lonely. 

This was it. This was everything. This life was all Jon was ever going to get, and he knew that he would die like Gertrude Robinson: in the line of duty, leaving nobody behind but an empty chair and a dusty cabinet full of cassettes clutching tightly to the disembodied voice of a dead man. 

Finally, he wrangled his voice into something light. “With the amount of threats I’ve had on my life lately, I may not even have those fifty years.” He sobered slightly, looking at Mike out of the corner of his eye as if he could dissect his human disguise just by looking at him askance. “You’re not telling me this out of the...goodness of your heart. What do you want? How do I snap out of this hallucination? You told Sasha you wanted to help us. So help us.”

“This _is_ me helping you,” Mike said patiently. “And this is no hallucination, Jon. It’s as real as your ordinary life is. It’s just...simpler. What this life is, Jon, is a happy life. You have friends here. Monsters, once so strange and frightening, are a normal and mundane part of your life. Nothing is scary, or difficult. It’s a little boring, yes, but you can find meaning in the small things. Meaning in listening to your favorite music on the job, meaning in making that perfect cup of coffee. A simple life, thinking only of tomorrow instead of the next fifty years. I hear that it’s very easy to find love in coffee shops. Maybe you’ll even find that too. Happiness is possible. It could even, in the strangest miracle of all, be possible for you.”

Jon narrowed his eyes. “I don’t take Faustian deals.”

“It’s not a deal,” Mike said smoothly. “Call it a gift. Or, if you wanted to be cynical, a mutually beneficial arrangement. Let’s just say that there are certain parties who are invested in not having to deal with the Archivist anymore. I suggested that there were...other ways of getting someone to stop bothering us rather than gristly murder, and they agreed. There is one player in specific who thought that this would be a good opportunity for you to grow. Of course, if you _don’t_ find this preferable to gristly murder, I’m sure something can be arranged…”

“No need,” Jon said quickly. The lights in the street were brightening as the sun was dimming, sinking deeply into the concrete ground. Soon it would be night again, as happened so reliably, and the world would continue slowly rotating counter-clockwise on its axis. The crowds were thinning, though never completely, and Jon found much of his attention captured by the passerby. Stylish and hurried, or slovenly and shambling. The great diversity of man, spread out like cockroaches scuttling from shelter to food, with no meaning and their eyes glazed over with distractions. Masses were doped on the opium of religion and consumerism, and Jon was no better than any of them. 

In his better moods, he often saw something beautiful in humanity. Stunning in silliness, in the smiles they frequently afforded each other, in the careless way some people touched others. The profundity of human connection shocked him sometimes, made him feel like an alien interloper into an otherwise happy race. Or maybe it was they who were the aliens, strange and foreign, and Jon was the last human left. 

“No need,” Jon repeated firmly. “And I don’t take gifts from eldritch beings. I’m sorry, but I would - I would rather live in the real world than this boring fantasy. I’ve never tolerated falsehood in my life, and I won’t tolerate it now.”

Mike clicked his tongue, an inscrutable sound. “That is very much like you, Jon. When you were eleven you started refusing to attend church, didn’t you? It wasn’t rational enough for you. You couldn’t stand the lies. I suppose this is similar enough.”

Something in Jon’s skin prickled. “How do you know that?” 

“You are not nearly as much of a difficult person to understand as you think,” Mike said, almost drawling the words. “Even for a human, actually, you’re pretty pathetically ordinary. Just this...ball of anxiety and fear and buttons waiting to be pressed. I do like you, Jon, and I do want to help you. Let me make it a little easier for you.”

Then he stopped walking, and Jon stopped walking too. And under the dim streetlamps of London, shallowly breathing in the dusty and polluted air, heedless of the faceless and mindless crush of people, Mike leaned in close and whispered something to Jon. It was short, and didn’t take much explaining. 

It was a deal. One that Jon didn’t have to think twice about before accepting. 

  
  
  


Jon woke up at 5:45 AM, this time without a headache. 

He rolled out of bed, pissed, and sleepily picked his hair with one hand as he applied deodorant with the other. He put on his morning playlist on his phone, which was lots of peppy high energy Broadway songs he would never admit to listening to, and carefully chose his outfit for the day. Tim always said that he paid way too much attention to his costuming, but Tim was a disaster bisexual, so what did he know. 

He poured himself a bowl of granola and splashed some yogurt on it, and brewed a mucky pot of tea. He sipped at it as he scrolled through his phone, noticing with a sense of relief that absolutely nothing was going on in the world at all. As usual. 

His phone buzzed, and Jon didn’t bother checking it before pulling on his socks and toeing on his loafers. He locked the door to his flat behind him, humming along to the morning playlist blasting through his earbuds, and waved at a waiting Sasha and team of coworkers in a sputtering car. He slid in easily, passing Sasha a mug of thank-you coffee that was thankfully unspiked, and she downed it in two seconds before going back to her spiked one. 

“Good morning, everyone,” Jon said easily. “Guess what I read in the news this morning?”

“Princess Di sneezed and her undead nose flew off?” Sasha said, skidding the car at breakneck speeds out of the drive and into the rush hour traffic. “Just like last week?”

Jon deflated. “Yeah. You read the Sun too?”

“It’s only our nation’s most reputable newspaper.” In cue, Sasha, Tim, and Jon all said in complete and synchronized monotone, “All hail Murdoch, King of Kings.”

“Oh, haha, this is fun!” Martin leaned forward, tugging at Jon’s sleeve. “You didn’t call me last night. I mean, no pressure or anything, but I specifically asked you to?”

“Jesus, Martin, you aren’t my wife.” Jon shook Martin’s hand off, catching a glimpse of his dropped open jaw in the rearview mirror. “I came home last night and crashed, okay? We’ll talk during lunch.”

“I’m sorry Jon’s not your husband, Martin,” Tim said seriously, putting a hand on Martin’s shoulder. “I know how hard this is for you.”

“You know,” Sasha hinted, “if you two wanted to get together in a certain biblical sense, mayhaps, in _two weeks and three days exactly,_ I would be _mighty thankful._ Just consider it! Three weeks and two days, that’s November 23rd exactly, I can write it down if you like -”

“I want a cut of the pool,” Jon said flatly. 

“And you’ll _get_ your cut, you just need to work with me a little bit, darling -”

Martin squeaked, bright red. “I - I don’t think this is appropriate workplace conversation…”

“We’re not in the workplace, we’re in my car,” Sasha said, somewhat condescendingly, as she ran another red light. “Now pay attention, lads: Bigby’s or Jameson’s?”

“Jameson’s,” Tim called dibs immediately. “Happy Hour Tuesdays they have pints for five quid and a smile, which is the best you’re going to get in this godforsaken city.”

“Bigby’s,” Jon shot back. “It doesn’t smell like a sewer.”

“I’m not paying seven quid for a pint, Jon! We’re baristas!”

“Yes, but Bigby’s takes the worms as currency,” Jon explained. “So far as I can tell is that it’s about one worm for every five pounds, a beetle is five pounds and fifty pence, and an ant is seventy five pence. There’s five ants to one beetle, and two beetles and six ants to a worm.” 

They all sat in silence, trying to figure that shit out. Martin’s jaw was still dropped. 

“Still less confusing than the shillings,” Tim said finally. 

“Shillings and guineas made perfect sense,” Jon protested half-heartedly. “There’s, uh, about six shillings to...five ha’ pennies...to about ten pennies...to about twenty farthings...okay, it didn’t make any sense.”

“I think five shillings was a crown,” Tim volunteered. 

“No, two shillings and six pence was a ha’ crown,” Sasha corrected. “That would make six shillings and twelve pence a crown, right?” 

“How many pence to a bob?” Tim asked. 

“Fuck me if I know,” Jon said. 

“At least we still use the metric system,” Sasha said. “Can you _imagine_ trying to figure out what the fuck a ‘foot’ was all day?”

Martin whimpered. 

  
  
  


Work was boring as usual. The only change was Elias sending Jon an email saying that corporate wanted them to try out latte art, so they spent half the day trying to figure out how to draw pentagrams with chocolate syrup on milk foam. Tim had an exceptional artistic flair, Martin mangled every cup of coffee that was put in front of him. Business as usual. 

The only strange thing, in fact, was the fact that Martin ambushed him in the break room and pulled him into the deep freezer, which of course, was not actually a freezer, but rather a portal to a shadowy corner of your memories. Today it was Jon’s childhood basement, the one that had given him that childhood fear of spiders lurking underneath the boiler and between the pressed pages of bad literature. He had gotten over it by the time he reached high school, and now the fear was a fuzzy memory that was only barely recalled. There was not much to be afraid of anymore. Besides, he never would have made a suitable member of his grandmother’s cult, anyway.

It was never on Jon’s to-do list to get ambushed by Martin. It was not why he woke up in the morning, and it was not what got him through the day. He roughly shoved him away, fastidiously straightening his crisp t-shirt and skinny jeans, frowning at an increasingly panicked Martin. Actually, Martin was puffing himself up, like an anxious puffer fish about to explode if a predator so much as looked at him wrong. 

“Okay, spill,” Martin cried, wringing his hands, “tell me your genius plan right now so we can put it in action and get out of here, because if I get paid in jelly cubes for the till one more time I am going to go insane. Is it to blend in? Is that what you’re doing, pretending you get all these in-jokes? I’m not good at blending in at all, _or_ understanding humor. You gotta help me out Jon, I’m going nutters.”

“That you are,” Jon said, eyeing him strangely. In a strange philanthropic impulse, he put his hands out and pantomimed deep breathing until Martin finally got the picture and started deep breathing too, forcing his hands to lay still at his sides. “There you go. We all right now? Would you like some tea?”

“I don’t tea, I want answers!” Martin glared at him, which was a new one. Normally Jon was doing the glaring. “How are we getting home? What’s your plan? _Why_ are you wearing _jeans?_ ”

“Well, I thought we were each going to our respective homes through carpooling in Sasha’s car,” Jon said slowly, fully aware of how susceptible Martin was to brain damage. He could trip over air. “My plan for getting home is...Sasha’s car. And I’m wearing jeans because the dress code here is very casual, and they’re comfortable. Does that answer all of your questions?”

Martin froze, and a look of dawning...something rose over his face. “You’ve been had,” Martin hissed. “Like Sasha and Tim. You’ve fallen prey to the virus!”

“The Virus is a paying customer,” Jon reminded him, “and it always tips well, so do try to be polite.”

“I’m not a barista, Jon!” Martin yelled, for the first time that Jon could remember, and he recoiled. The sound echoed strangely around the pseudo-basement that they were standing in, gloom hugging the corners and eaves and making it difficult to distinguish fine details other than the smell of rotting rood Jon remembered so clearly from his childhood, but the expression on Martin’s face was easy to distinguish. “I’m a researcher, a scientist! Okay, I majored in sociology and cultural anthropology in uni, but that’s a kind of science, innit? I fill out IRB forms for a living and I clean off the blood that they come back bathed in! I’m an expert at writing grants! And you’re a scientist too, Jon. You’re a researcher. That’s part of you.”

“My degree was in library sciences,” Jon said, confused. “I guess the word sciences is in there, but really it’s more social -”

Martin took a deep breath, and then another one. “Jon.” He inhaled, then exhaled. Although Jon was not scared of spiders, some part of him was tensely watching out of the corner of his eye for them anyway. “I spent last night looking around my flat. There’s no other word for it. It’s...cozy. It has books on how to grow my own veggie patch. All of the lamps are dim? My library has, wow, tripled. It’s really basically an ideal situation. I could live sustainably and on the cheap, enjoying public amenities and honest labour.”

“Well, that’s very good, then,” Jon said, mollified. “But I don’t know what that has to do with me.”

“Jon, I do not want to learn bread baking and sewing for the rest of my life,” Martin hissed. “I do not want to read by the window as it rains and take long walks in the park! I am an Archivist and a _wee bit of an adrenaline junkie!_ Get us out of here!”

It was official, and a long time coming. Martin was off his nut. Martin felt pity for him, as you might feel pity for a schizo man twitching in the tube, or for a dead squirrel. But Martin wasn’t a bad guy, not really. As someone who could frequently be a bit of an arse, Jon respected the traits of kindness and caring a lot in other people. They were foreign to him, like a language he couldn’t speak or understand, as inscrutable as his basic Ancient Sumerian courses in high school. Jon decided that he didn’t tell Martin this frequently enough, so he took a deep breath and looked Martin dead in the eyes. Martin looked terrified. 

“Look,” Jon said slowly, enunciating each word. “You seem a bit stressed. Maybe you had some bad fish last night or something. You’ve been working the till for a while. How about you take it easy today, and you come along with us on the pub crawl tonight, alright? Relax, have a drink, we can talk about...sociology. Doesn’t that sound nice, Martin?”

His attempt seemed to backfire. Martin narrowed his eyes, clearly growing more and more suspicious. “That’s a very kind offer, Jon.”

“Well, I do try,” Jon said humbly. 

“Maybe even…” Martin narrowed his eyes further. “Too kind.”

“Last time I checked the impersonating creatures were drinking house brew straight from the tap and Sasha was beating them off with broomsticks,” Jon said, “so I’m not sure what you’re worried about here.” He sighed, drawing together his willpower to be kind to the likely concussion victim. With exacting slowness, he reached out a hand and clapped Martin on the shoulder. “There, there. Relax in my childhood basement for a while. Forget about this whole mess.” On cue, the sound of breaking glass bottles echoed above their heads, accompanied by shrill screaming. “Bask in the sounds of my repressed childhood trauma. Come back out when you feel better.”

“Ah,” Martin said, somewhat dizzily. “So I’m on my own, then.”

“If you insist.” Jon clapped him on the shoulder again, for good measure, and tried his best to project a calm air. “I think Sasha hid some Hobnobs under the creaky floorboards where I used to stash my illicit Pokemon collection. Cheers, mate.”

“Cheers,” Martin said.

Jon climbed back up the steps, hopping over the creaky floorboards, whistling a jaunty tune and feeling like a very good manager. 

  
  
  


As Jon helped stock the pastry display, watching a small group of somber sailors draw straws to decide who would be ritually sacrificed, he thought about liminal spaces. 

There was a special power, Jon thought, in the in-between space. In the space that existed to bring you from one state to another, a transitionary period. It was the same power beholden in the act of creation: in the act of building, in the act of designing or drawing or writing. It probably even has something to do with that supposed ‘magic of childhood’ thing everyone kept rambling about. The sheer act of being on a ship, of riding on a bus or in a car, held its own magic. 

According to the droll ramblings of Tim, he believed coffee shops to be one of those places. Not meant to be stayed in, yet purposefully made cozy and accessible either way, he was enthusiastic in his mission to bring a safe zone to every tired rat spinning in its wheel of work. Jon didn’t feel quite as personally responsible for upholding the magic of coffee shops as Tim did. He mostly just wanted to clock in, do his work, and then go home. 

He slowly slid in cakes, one after another, into the display. A large tarantula on a girl’s night out with a small posse of hundreds of other tarantulas came waddling into the coffee shop, and Martin cheerfully made small talk with them about the salon they were going to later that day. Jon tried not to pay any attention, his own mind drifting to the many hobbies he enjoyed out of work. Such as...well, he liked baking bread...watching black and white movies...right? 

Jobs weren’t lives. They were just things you did so you can have a life. Jon enjoyed travelling long distances, making occasional weekend trips to Scotland and enjoying the moors. He often went on road trips with Sasha and Tim, staying in Air BnBs and finding the worst ale Scotland had to offer. They even went to Wales one time, although that place was a pit. He wanted to save up enough for Paris. He had a life that he refused to sacrifice to capitalism. 

But what was the point, really? He worked eight hours a day so he could drink away the memory of the day for two hours. Then he stumbled home, tidied up the flat, fucked around on the internet, and passed out asleep. Living to work so you can eat so you can live…

Nope. Nope. Jon’s mind drifted away from the topic, almost stubbornly. What was the point in being sad? What was the point of thinking about this? Jon was living for tomorrow from now on. He was going to be happy, _all the time,_ because if he felt sad and angry and impotent for one more second he was going to kill himself. Although he didn’t quite remember what had been making him angry. Martin…? Yes, likely Martin. 

Life wasn’t worth living if it was going to be spent in misery. Nonexistence, nonfeeling, was far preferable to sadness. Sometimes Jon felt as if he stood too tall, as if he was just too much, and he had to take a hatchet to himself just to fit in the small box he was given, leaking bloody pieces everywhere...but wasn’t that safer? And hadn’t Jon always just wanted to be safe?

“Jon! Check out this video on Baby Yoda! Oh, he’s just so cute!” Sasha tapped him with her foot, eagerly sticking a phone in front of his face. “There’s a scene in the latest episode where he eats Boba Fett!”

“Baby Yoda!” Jon cried. “There is nothing on this Earth I love more! I love Baby Yoda! Show me!”

“Right,” Sasha enthused, as she turned the volume up so she and Jon could watch the adorable little clip that made Jon’s heart sing. “I love Star Wars, and Disney, and Marvel, and Game of Thrones, and James Bond movies, and the new Ghostbusters reboot -”

“ - and the X Factor, and the Great British Bake-off, and Downton Abbey, and the Graham Norton show!” Jon finished for her. “I’m so glad the government mandates a TV license!”

“You know,” Martin said, thoroughly panicked as he bagged a sugar skull in a paper bag for a small group of eerily silent pre-med students with blank faces, “when you put it like that, it sounds a little strange.”

“Does the sugar skull have real teeth?” one of the premed students asked, clutching a gigantic textbook under their arm. 

“No, love, they don’t,” Martin said kindly. “Here, you go study in the corner, I’ll bring you a coffee in an hour, alright? Take your time. Do those flashcards. You’ll get through this.”

“Thank you, coffee man,” they all chorused in unison, just like regular pre-med students, and they all huddled in a corner slurping coffee and pouring it slowly over their textbook, just like pre-med students. 

The clip of Baby Yoda was, indeed, very cute, and gave Jon increased motivation to live. But something about it seemed to wig out Martin, who had gone back to giving all of the worms a very inhospitable treatment. He was eyeing the fire extinguisher every two seconds, and Jon was forced to apologize to what looked like the lower half of who was probably Jane Prentiss after she (they? it?) were left waiting for their coffee for more than twenty minutes. 

“Nobody saved me,” Jane Prentiss, or something, burbled, “who will save you? Who will save the Archivist who doesn’t want to be saved? Who will save the girl who loved the stars too fondly to be fearful of the night?”

“Uh,” Jon said. He recognized that poem, actually. It was one of his favorites. “Tycho Brahe?”

Jane Prentiss sighed, or...did something approximating it. “Never mind. You’re out of the way. Isn’t that all that matters? That we crawl back into our little holes, slithering, writhing, loving, living? I will build a hole with you. I will build a hole in you. I will -”

“I’ll get you your coffee right away, ma’am,” Jon said, not fleeing, but leaving quickly. 

That was the second time in as many days he heard the word Archivist. If a new, unflattering nickname for him was going around the community, he would like to know about it. It rippled a tingle down his spine, making his hair stand on end, but he wasn’t quite sure why. Whatever the reason why their patrons wanted him out of the way, Jon didn’t care. He would happily stay out of the way. He knew better than to get involved in their nonsense. 

He was forced to drop pointed hints to Martin that, although he understood he was tired, he couldn’t discriminate against Prentiss just because she was made out of worms. Jon tried his best to be understanding about it, suggesting that Martin let Sasha take over the till for a bit even if her fake customer service smile scared even the Nameless Entities of Fear, but something about his expression seemed to set Martin off. 

“Look, maybe you should take a few days off,” Jon suggested, cautiously eyeing the way that Martin was clutching a plastic cup so hard it was splintering. “Clear your head. You needn’t live at work.”

“Real hypocritical coming from you, mate,” Martin muttered, depositing the cup in the trash. “No thanks. I’m sure that whatever’s trapping us here is inside the shop right now. I’m sick of being trapped by - by things. It was better when at least we _knew_ we couldn’t leave.”

“What do you mean, hypocritical?” Jon asked, confused and slightly offended. “I leave at three sharp every day.”

Martin opened his mouth, maybe to say something, maybe to be grouchy again, but then another dead rat tried to sneak in and Sasha ran out with another broomstick. The conversation would have to wait for lunch. 

But it did make him view the tired and familiar shop with new eyes. Martin was cracked, but Jon couldn’t help but wonder. The idea of some innocuous customer in the most boring workplace in the world trapping them there like - well, not to make a racist joke, but like a fly in a spider’s web - was spooky. Was it the premed students, chanting hymns as they poured coffee over their med textbooks? No, those kids tipped well and were always sweet. Maybe it was yet another member of that Eye Cult, except they spent most of their time stuffing pamphlets in the tip jar and haranguing paying customers. Surely if they had the power to trap him in the shop, they would have done so already? Was it the burly woman with the shaved head and the kid whose name Jon thought might be Oliver, sitting at a corner table together, exchanging morbid stories? They honestly seemed nice. Who, in this in-between zone that promised safety, was not safe? 

Could any of them have a grudge against him? Sure, one time he had almost accidentally called the cops on the Not-Them because he saw a random stranger walk in with regular Graham’s credit card, but that was a misunderstanding that had been smoothed over. It seemed a little bigoted just to assume that because something or someone was different from you, then it was inherently malicious. Jon wasn’t always the most friendly guy, but he had few in the way of enemies. 

He brought up the situation during lunch, where he, Tim, and Sasha shamelessly abandoned Martin to the wolves of the customers as they huddled in the kitchen, exchanging bits of sandwiches and snacks. Sasha was still cooing over Baby Yoda videos, but Jon had other things on his mind. 

“Where did you work before you started working here?” Jon asked Sasha, as he carefully ate a ham sandwich. 

Sasha didn’t look up. “Some place. Boring, probably. Why?”

“No reason,” Jon said, privately thinking that it was kind of weird not to remember where you worked a few years ago. “Tim? What about you?”

Tim nibbled on some chips. “Some place. Boring, probably. Why?”

“No...reason?” For some reason, Jon’s skin began to prickle, and he absently rubbed his arms. Cold in the kitchen. “Do either of you know what an Archivist is?”

“Someone who works in archives?” Tim guessed. His eyes were a little glassy, as he chewed almost robotically on his chips. “I’m pretty sure only a real prick would take a job like that.”

“Oh, definitely,” Sasha agreed. “Douchiest job ever.”

“Wouldn’t want to hang out with someone who’s an Archivist, that’s for sure,” Tim said. 

Jon began to feel a little awkward. His degrees were, ostensensibly, for librarians, and an archivist and a librarian were pretty similar jobs. “Right. Well, this was fun, but I have to go...polish the espresso machine. If you’ll excuse me.” 

He stood up, but Sasha kept slowly and robotically eating her sandwich, eyes glazed. “Misanthropic as ever, Jon,” Sasha said. “When are you going to let yourself make real friends?”

“I thought we were friends,” Jon said, a little hurt. 

“Don’t bother, Sasha,” Tim said, eyes half-closed. “Jon Sims is too good for everybody. Too good to work in a coffee shop, Jon?”

“No! I mean, I like my job!”

“Then why don’t you act like it?” Tim demanded. “Nobody hired you to ask questions, Jon. It’s giving you bags under your eyes.”

“Get laid,” Sasha said. “Honestly, Jon, a thirty year old virgin? Pretty pathetic.”

“I have to go polish the espresso machine,” Jon said, and fled the room, feeling terrible. 

Something was weird. No, something was _wrong._ Martin had been acting weird all day - but that could be dismissed, Martin was always weird - but now it was Sasha and Tim too. Sometimes it felt like the patrons stared at him out of the corner of their eyes, daring him to make a move. Sometimes it felt like Jon was a butterfly pinned to a piece of paper, trapped under glass. Something was making him itch. The feeling of being...looked at, and of being seen. 

And there was nothing wrong with being an older man who hadn’t had sex! How had she even _known_ that?

In the front, Martin was attempting to sign for a package. Two delivery men were standing by the counter, which in and of itself was weird - food and produce delivery came through the back entrance, in almost all instances. Martin seemed to be arguing with the first delivery man, who just smiled creepily at him, but when Jon walked up everyone stopped talking and turned to him. 

The delivery man was a short, gaunt man, with a craggy face and a sharp pinstripe suit. Behind him stood another, much taller man, somewhat fat but somehow still gaunt. The short man tipped his haunt, smiling like a jack o’ lantern. They looked, somehow, exactly like you’d expect. “Evening, Archivist. Talk to Mike after work yesterday?”

“Who?” Jon asked blankly. He hadn’t talked to anybody after he left the coffee shop yesterday. 

“Oh, I suppose it’s no concern of yours.” The short man pushed forward the same clipboard that Martin had been trying to take, with a blank piece of paper that had a great deal of writing on it. The black letters seemed to wiggle on the page, the empty page swirling in the vortex of white. At the top of the paper read, or didn’t, ‘BREEKON & HOPE’. “Sign here, please.”

Jon stared at the paper. He somehow had the sense that giving the paper his name would be a mistake. Slowly, he wrote down ‘John Simmons’ with a flourish and passed the paper back. The delivery man took a look at the name and his eyebrows rose, and he smiled. 

The delivery man tipped his hat again. “Evening, gents.”

“Have a nice day,” Jon said politely. The tall, stout man said nothing, following his partner out the door. 

The minute the two men left the room Martin grabbed a surprisingly large knife out from under the counter and sawed the top box on the stack open with surprising viciousness. He cracked the box open to reveal…

Cassette tapes. Dozens of them. The box was full to bursting with them, nothing but cassette tapes. Jon had been expecting new caramel syrups, since they were out and all, but it was just cassette tapes. Martin slammed the lid of the box shut, scowling mightily, and dumped the box on the ground so he could saw open the box underneath. When he opened it, all they saw were more cassette tapes. 

As surprised as Jon was, Martin just seemed grim. 

“Why am I even complaining?” He muttered to himself. “I hated my actual job. Tried to quit ten times. I was living in the basement. Lived in fear of worms every day. I had a will written out and everything. How is this not better? How is the life of a friendly neighborhood barista not preferable?”

“Uh, Martin?” Jon asked, picking up one of the cassettes. Written on the white label, in handwriting that was unbearably familiar, was the name ‘JONATHAN SIMS”. “My name is on all of these.”

“Right.” Martin plucked the cassette from Jon’s hand, holding it by the corner with two fingers like it was a dead rat, and dropped it back in the box. “Time to stick all this in the furnace, then. Say goodbye, Jon.”

“They have my name on them! We can’t burn them! What if they’re important?”

“They are undoubtedly important,” Martin said, glancing behind them at the door to the kitchen. Tim and Sasha didn’t seem to be hearing anything they were saying, silently watching Baby Yoda videos. “However, if we listen to them, we’ll probably die in seven days. These go in the garbage, although they’re the only lead I have for what’s going on, and it’s probably a good idea to listen to them if I ever want to get out of here. Which I...do? I do. Yep.”

“Martin, you are being unbearably strange today,” Jon said, exasperated. But he picked up a cassette again, and realized that he deeply _did_ want to listen to them. They had his name on them. More than that, they seemed like his. “But, so are Sasha and Tim...let’s find a tape recorder.”

“I’m being strange? What about you, Mr. Nice Guy?” Martin reached out and tried to grab the cassette from Jon’s hands, but Jon was about a third of a meter taller than him, so he just held it over his head where Martin couldn’t reach. “You haven’t insulted my intelligence once today!”

“Would you like me to?”

“Yes! No! Ugh!” Martin scrubbed his face. “I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know anything anymore. We’re closed!” The patron who had been slinking up the counter slowly slunk away. “I care about the truth more than anything, more than happiness or security, and this just isn’t it. It’s just not _true_.”

“Sometimes we have to lie to survive,” Jon pointed out, not knowing what they were talking about. But something about Martin’s words struck a chord in him, hit on some essential note that he hadn’t yet scrubbed out. “We can’t live life brutally honest about how miserable it all is. A lot of little lies help us believe the big ones. What’s so wrong about living a life that’s happy?” His gaze drifted to the box of cassettes. “What’s wrong with a life where I’m happier?”

“I’m sure it would be nice, Jon! I’m sure that - that the life where you’re sweet and friendly and watch classic movies with me late at night would be just perfect! But that’s not you. I like you for _you._ The person who you are, that’s - that’s perfect to me. I wouldn’t trade a thousand friendly Jons for one asshole Jon. I don’t like the idea of you, or the person I think you could be - I like _you._ Even though you’re a pill who hates me.” Martin huffed, crossing his arms and uncrossing them, uncertain of how to position his own body. “Don’t make fun of me for saying that.”

Jon opened his mouth, then closed it. He didn’t know what to say, and even if he did then he knew he wouldn’t be able to say it, so he said, “Let’s find a tape recorder.” Then, because sometimes he could be brave, “I don’t hate you.” 

“I’ve never won a fight with you,” Martin sighed. “I’m going on break for an hour. Let’s see if we can find a working tape player in London.”

Neither of them brought up telling Tim and Sasha about the cassettes, and Jon knew in his stomach that they shouldn’t. 

  
  
  


An hour later, which in practice meant a disastrous hour trying to be a decent cashier, Martin burst through the doors of the shop in victory, clutching a boombox from 2005. It was ugly as sin, pearly white case long since yellowed and spotted with age, but it still worked. Jon awkwardly lugged the two heavy boxes around as Martin wandered around the shop, trying to find someplace relatively secluded without any sharp objects nearby where they could listen to the tapes. 

“Why don’t we try the walk in freezer?” Jon suggested. “It’s not actually that cold, you know.”

Martin coughed, and shuffled his feet, and looked around awkwardly as if another room would magically pop up that gave them some measure of privacy, which everybody knew only ever happened during March. Finally, Martin was forced to give up his silent refusal and stand in front of the freezer, awkwardly crossing his arms and rocking on his heels. 

“Open it up, then,” Martin said. 

“My hands are full,” Jon said, irritated. “You open it up.”

“Put down the boxes and then open it up, and I’ll hold it open, and you pick up the boxes and bring them inside.”

“Open up the bloody door, Martin!”

Martin opened the door, very upset about it. He sulked into the room, that for some reason always seemed to manifest as the trauma of whoever had opened the door, and Jon cautiously followed after him. 

It looked a lot like the back rooms of the uni libraries that Jon had spent so much time in. A large, windowless room, crowded with compact shelving controlled by winches. Thick oak tables with cheap lamps stood in the center, every one of which had every available inch covered with boxes and stacks of papers. Boxes were stacked on the floor, some small and some intimidatingly large. Some were clearly longboxes, like the kind you would use for comics, and some were stuffed full of manila folders. Some of them had strange objects poking out the top, but only one desk had a chair attached to it. The chair was well worn, pushed a little out from the desk as if whoever had been sitting at it had just stepped out. A mug of coffee sat at that table, long since cooled, and a Macbook teetered precariously on top of a stack of papers. It was this desk that Martin beelined to, gently pushing aside the mug to drop the boombox on the table. He dragged forward another chair and put it next to the main one, and sat in that, and clearly gestured for Jon to sit down in the well worn chair. Jon carefully put down the large stack of boxes on the only space available on the desk, sitting down at the chair. The room was musty, overly oaky and wooden, and something about it seemed to both depress Jon and excite him. It felt like a place he could spend a lot of time in. 

“Hey, that Macbook looks just like mine.” Privately, Jon was wondering what about this place was so scary to Martin. Aside from that strange, earthy and musky smell, it was perfectly cozy. 

“Oh, wow, does it? Wow. Amazing. What’ll they think of next.” Martin shot the box full of cassettes an apprehensive look. “Go ahead, then. They’re your tapes.”

They were his, and he didn’t know why. Jon carefully picked one up and, with some slight banging and finagling, popped open the tape deck of the boombox and slid in the cassette. He pressed play, waiting with bated breath for the tape to begin running. Martin seemed just as tense as he was, probably more so, jumping at shadows and whenever a piece of paper rustled. Distantly, if Jon focused hard enough, he thought that he might hear the faint rustling of worms, but when he thought too hard about it he stopped hearing it. 

Finally, a voice crackled from the boombox. It was Jon’s own. 

“Statement begins. I am so tired. I am so tired. I am so tired. I wish I was asleep. I am so tired. Maybe I can fall asleep at my desk. Would anybody care if I did…? No, I should work. I am so tired. Every time I try to fall asleep I hear worms. I am so tired.” 

The cassette abruptly clicked off, and Jon and Martin both stared at it. 

“Well,” Jon said finally, fighting hard to keep his voice from shaking, “needless to say, I don’t remember recording _that.”_

“It sounds almost like...like thoughts,” Martin said slowly. “Like what would go through your mind at your desk, you know? Play another one.”

He did. And another. And another. 

“I’m sick of this job. I should quit, except I hate job hunting...and some part of me doesn’t want them to win...ugh, I’m tired.”

“Martin is so freaking stupid. How can one man be that incompetent? He can mess up even the simplest tasks. And with that smile on his face! How’d he even _get_ a job here? This place must not be swimming in applicants…”

“I wonder what happened to Gertrude Robinson. I don’t want to go out like she did. Just another mystery. I never should have read all those Holmes books before bed last night. What am I going to make for dinner…might as well skip again.”

“What the _fuck_ is this _fucking stupid_ sorting system _fuck me_ I _hate_ this shit. Time to yell at Martin over something. This is so fucking nonsensical. I hate being Head Archivist. I wish I could quit. But it’s not time yet. It’s not time…”

“If I was ever replaced by the Not-Them, would anybody notice? I don’t think anybody would care, really. Who likes me? Maybe Tim, but he likes everybody...I’m so alone all the time.”

Jon quickly took that tape out, ejecting it harshly and stuffing it back in the box. He sat in silence with Martin for a second, both of them feeling somewhat frazzled and confused. Jon still didn’t know what a Head Archivist was, except for the fact that the man in the tapes - the man with his voice, with his insecurities but not his thoughts - was one, and that he may have made more powerful enemies then he knew. 

“Just one more,” Martin whispered, and slid in another tape. It was at the very top of the pile, and had already been cracked open. 

“I have no choice,” the tape said, the other Jon’s voice sounding panicked and afraid. “There’s nothing I can do. I don’t want to work in a stupid fucking coffee shop all my life, even if it _is_ less dangerous, but this Mike arsehole says that he’d wipe Martin’s memories if I don’t take his deal. I’m Martin’s boss, I _lied_ to him when I said I had a plan. I have to protect him. He doesn’t deserve this shit. Whatever...whatever Mike is going to do to me, I can take it. I think he’s going to wipe my memories. It doesn’t matter. I don’t have anything worth remembering. So long as Martin still remembers, we’ll be fine. I hope. Or we’re all doomed. I don’t know anymore. I’m scared. But what else is new.”

The cassette cut out. Martin was crying a little, rubbing at his eyes, and Jon felt abruptly very bad. He awkwardly reached over and patted Martin on the back, two solid thumps, unwilling to speak, feeling as if he had already said enough. 

“I can’t believe it,” Martin said, quickly tamping down on the tears. Jon had the sense that Martin was that kind of person: sensitive, as willing to feel other people’s pain as his own. Jon felt like his own pain was too much for himself, sometimes, that it was overflowing. He could never handle anybody else’s pain in addition to his own. Did it mean that Martin’s life was easier, that he had less pain? Or that he was stronger? “That Jon would...well, you always did have a strange picture of a Head Archivist’s job. He would have done it for anyone. It’s not anything, like, special about me that Jon would -”

“I, like, super don’t care about whatever crisis you’re having,” Jon said supportively. “Can you explain how my memories were apparently _wiped_ ? And how I’m apparently _not_ a barista?”

“Oh. Oh, yeah! Sorry!”

Martin explained the situation in short order - that the barista thing was a recent development, that Jon was actually a recently and suspiciously promoted Head Archivist to The Magnus Institute, which is in fact not a coffee shop but a research institute that is very poorly regarded by the scientific community, and that most of their regular customers are all bloodthirsty monsters who try to eat them on a daily basis. A few days ago, Martin had been living in the basement of the Institute because Jane Prentiss was trying to eat him, and so far as Martin could tell Jon hadn’t admitted to anything weird going on but hadn’t really been eating or sleeping anyway and could frequently be found in his office, stuffing up the gaps in the walls muttering about worms. Today, Jon was a “surprisingly relaxed barista” and Martin was having a meltdown. 

“You still seem to basically be you,” Martin was saying, somewhat suspiciously. “Just, like, if you had a three month old vacation and were really well rested and you started eating vegetables and that sort of thing. You haven’t snapped at me once today, which is really creeping me out. You used to be kinda like this back before you were promoted, but once you became Head Archivist you started acting like your brain’s on fire all the time. Not that I knew you very well before you were promoted! You, uh, didn’t leave the archival rooms very often. I’m not certain that a managerial position was good for you. What was Elias thinking, I ask myself. When you got promoted, we were all like, ‘Wow, who?’, and then Sasha was like, ‘That bloke who never leaves the basement, I think’, and we were all like, ‘Wait, that weirdo? He smells kind of weird’, and I should really shut up now.”

“I see,” Jon said dizzily, fighting the urge to sniff himself. He did anyway. He smelled like he always did - sandalwood. “So, what now, then? What do we do?”

Martin opened his mouth, then closed it. Finally, he sheepishly said, “I was hoping you had an idea. But, er, I guess not...I guess I’m...as the last employee with any memory, I guess...I’m the - the...leader of this, of this project.” He took a big gulp. “You never put me in charge of any projects.”

“I wonder why,” Jon said dryly. 

“But I can do it! Yep. That’s me, ol’ Martin Blackwood, very responsible. Okay. So. The plan is. The plan is...for _you_ to keep listening to these tapes! So you can get your memory back. As I...as I figure out a plan. Yes. Excellent.” Martin stood up abruptly, almost skittering the chair back. “Have at it, Jon. I will be back with - with an excellent plan.”

Jon sarcastically saluted, which seemed to only panic Martin more. He escaped as quickly as he could without outright running, and Jon settled himself in for a _very_ long time of listening to cassette tapes. Maybe, if he listened to enough, he would get his memory back. Then he could worry about other issues, such as where the tapes even _came_ from, who erased his memory in the _first_ place, and how he could get out of here. 

They erased his memory to keep him away. To keep him here, where the unusual was at the very least nonthreatening, and where life itself was not quite so scary and foreign. 

Jon slotted in another cassette into the recorder. They hadn’t accounted for the fact that Jon’s innate cowardice was only outmatched by his innate stubbornness. 

And _no_ monster made him look like an idiot in front of Martin. 

  
  
  


Jon learned a lot of things about the Head Archivist through those tapes. 

He had very little in the way of friends. He had a great deal of dedication towards his work, though if that was just out of lack of anything better to do or an actual love for the topic of research he didn’t know. There was a genuine belief in the supernatural - of course there was, although Jon had met more than one crazy conspiracy theorist in his day who denied the existence of werewolves in a thinly veiled antisemetic series of allegories - even if he was somewhat cagey about it. A lot of bitterness, a persistent tea addiction, and a surprisingly intense Star Trek addiction that apparently absolutely nobody knew about. The guy had to have _some_ hobbies, right?

But so far as he could tell, that was it. Work days starting at six and ending at midnight, coming home and stuffing an energy bar in his mouth, and passing out in bed only to wake up at five the next morning and start the whole process over again. Weekends were spent sleeping and binging Netflix. No vacations, no drinks with mates, no friends or partners. There was love for the work, and a deep satisfaction found in books and research, but nothing meaningful or fulfilling found within. An empty life, characterized by vague grasps for happiness, dependent on dreaming of something better one day. Meaningless. Vague hopes of leaving it all behind one day, but no intentions of ever doing so. And it only got worse once he was promoted. 

It was only then that this other Jon, the Jon who was him yet wasn’t, seemed to get more obsessed with the work. There was almost a hunger to the way he consumed knowledge, in the way that he recorded statement after statement. He slept and ate less. It seemed the only person who noticed, and the only person who cared, was Martin, which Jon resented highly. 

He was just starting on the next box when there was a knock at the door, and Jon quickly paused the cassettes. The door swung open and Tim stepped inside, twirling keys around his pointer finger and looking around the room without a trace of recognition on his face. 

“Jon? It’s time to close. We need you to lock up the store.”

“Yes. Yes, of course.” Jon shook himself, peeling himself away from another man’s life. He stood up, carefully packing the cassettes back up in the box and picking the boxes back up. “Thank you for reminding me. I’m afraid I’ve been a little distracted.”

“No wonder!” Tim said cheerfully. He had always had a big personality and a booming voice to match how he was barely a few centimetres shorter than Jon, gelled hair carefully swept up into a wave and chinos squeaking against the dusty concrete. Jon’s clearest memory of him, a memory that he now understood wasn’t real, was kissing him on a bar dare and feeling vaguely disappointed as Tim seemed to have some sort of religious experience. 

That night, Sasha had drunkenly divulged to Jon that he was quite possibly ‘in the top 10% of attractive blokes, 5% if you wear tank tops’, which he still didn’t know how to feel about. Georgie had used to say the same thing, except somehow in Jon’s mind Georgie fell under the ‘very good friend’ category and he often forgot that they had dated at all. He wondered if anybody had ever told Other Jon that. He wondered why Mike, or whoever had done this to him, had implanted that memory, if it truly was fake. To make him want to stay? To make him feel like more of a whole person, in a way that the Other Jon was not? 

“Mate? You coming, or are you going to sleep in the freezer?”

Or was it real? Was it Martin who was mistaken, these cassettes the result of an elaborate prank or some sort of inter-universal mishap? There were many explanations beyond the most destructive, the one that meant that Jon as he understood himself was not real -

But hadn’t he always known? Had he ever felt truly real?

“Coming,” Jon found himself saying, and turned the lights out as he went. 

  
  
  
  


The next morning, Martin burst into the shop like the hounds of hell were on his heels, waving a notebook. Which was ridiculous - the hounds of hell were already inside, playing poker. 

He was thirty minutes late for work, and Jon considered the fact that this all may be an elaborate hoax so Jon wouldn’t get him in trouble for skipping so much work. Sasha didn’t notice, already wasted on her Irish coffee snuck into a thermos, and neither did Tim, who was flirting with his favorite rich salesman customer for extra tips. It seemed that the only one who noticed or paid attention to Martin, in fact, was Jon, who had spent all of yesterday frantically trying to knit and failing. 

“It’s the Anglerfish!” Martin yelled, before collapsing in a heap on the counter. He heaved breaths, as if he had run all the way to the shop from the flat, and his face was drawn and haggard. Jon slowly slid him some coffee, and Martin gulped it down without even tasting it. He slapped the notebook on the counter, flipping it open to pages and pages of scribbled notes. “It’s the Anglerfish.”

“That bloke who never tips?” Jon flipped cautiously through the pages, leaning on the counter as Martin frantically slurped the coffee. “You shouldn’t pull all-nighters, Martin. They’re very bad for you.”

“You’re one to talk,” Martin groused, draining the cup and slamming it dramatically on the counter. Jon silently refilled it as Martin prodded the notebook with a finger. “Take a look at the victims. Jessica McEwan. Sarah Baldwin, later found working for some ghostie motherfuckers. Daniel Rawlings, later found working as a taxidermist. Young, innocent men and women, plucked from their lives and found somewhere else. Furthermore!” Martin flipped the pages past, as Jon wondered if he had overbrewed the coffee. “Jared, from that Boneturner’s Tale case. Later found working as a butcher. Why are all these people disappearing and turning up someplace else, different in some undefinable way? What did this to them? Did they do it to _us_?”

“It’s certainly possible,” Jon said diplomatically. 

“Moreover!” Martin raised a finger high in the air, like an accomplished orator rallying the crowds at a stump speech. “Mike has stated that he considers himself ‘neutral’ and ‘wants to help us’. How is trapping us in a coffee shop helping us, you may ask? What if The Magnus Institute itself is the danger? Say, hypothetically, from _worms_?”

Ah. That’s right. Martin mentioned that the Institute had been under siege from an army of worms lately. Jon wondered how severe of a problem this was. He leaned on the counter, carefully scanning Martin’s face and trying to mentally compare it against the Martin he knew and tolerated. This Martin seemed much more tired, more haggard. He jumped at movement out of the corner of his eye, and he twitched whenever the tip jar started wriggling again. Simply put, he looked like a man who had gone through a great deal. Whatever his - their - whatever- universe had, it didn’t seem like anything good. 

“So the worms in your Institute -”

“ _Ours -”_

“In the Institute, they’ve been getting in somehow, right?” Jon struggled to recall one of the tapes he had been listening to last night, the way there sometimes seemed to be a faint undercurrent of...writhing. “Maybe they can get in the same way in the shop. If we can see where the worms are coming from, maybe that’s where the Anglerfish is coming from.”

Martin froze, almost choking on his coffee. “You think the worms are coming from within the Institute?”

Jon just shrugged, standing straight and drying his hands on a towel. “I mean, spooky shit’s always happening there of all places, right? Maybe it’s in here too.”

Martin opened his mouth, then closed it. His face drained of all color and his eyes started frantically flitting around the room, as if a sea of worms was going to burst through the walls at any second. “And this is why you _actually_ have a degree,” Martin muttered, before quickly scrambling behind the counter and running into the kitchen. “I’m not doing any work today! Learn how to use the till!”

“How is that different from every other day,” Jon muttered, making his own coffee. He knew how to use the till. He was a manager, he knew how to use the freaking till. 

The rest of the day was almost boring. Almost. If it wasn’t for Martin running around like a madman knocking into walls, Tim and Sasha looking increasingly alarmed whenever Martin tried to unscrew the faucets, and the spectacular way Jon managed to fuck up basic customer service, it would have been pretty boring. 

The customers slowly filled in, one after another. The med students were back, this time with a young girl wearing pigtails who seemed to enjoy staring at the pictures. There were more spiders than there were yesterday, hugging the eaves of the room, getting hair all over the ottoman. Jon had to tell three men several times to stop smoking indoors, since their flesh curling up into smoke was setting off the fire alarms. 

He tried to sink into the work, but he just couldn’t focus. And that wasn’t just because Martin kept lifting up the tables that customers were sitting at. Last week, Jon had thought that the coffee shop and minimum wage drudgery would be the rest of his life. Today, he thought that maybe his life could be a little bit more. At least a little bit more well paid. 

The Other Jon thought very frequently that people didn’t care about him. But that couldn’t possibly be true. Martin seemed to care about Jon quite a bit. 

“Uh, boss? Is Martin alright?” Tim expertly squeezed out some more latte art, only glancing up to nervously kick Martin away from opening every bag of sugar in search for worms. “If he’s lost it then he should just go home.”

“Martin loses it over everything,” Sasha said dismissively. “Remember that one time he tried to make the spider we found in the basement the new shop pet? Shit was unsanitary.”

“Yes, it offended the spider patrons,” Jon said. He remembered the incident. Or - did he? Had it been real? Had any of it been real? “Just, er, ignore him. He’s - looking for skim milk. I asked him to.”

“Why isn’t he looking in the fridge for that,” Tim asked suspiciously, panicking Jon. “Is everything okay here?”

“Everything is fine!” Jon said, very rationally, in a reasonable tone of voice. “Just get back to work!”

But everything was not fine, which made Jon get back to work even harder. 

During lunch, during which Martin seemed to be going around knocking on every plank of wood and scrutinizing every blade of grass in the alley behind the shop, Jon ducked outside and attempted to light up his first cigarette in months. He had quit, but today was stressful. The first stressful day he could remember in - well, ever, actually. With his other hand he called Georgie. 

She picked up on the fifth ring. Jon could picture her: lying on her bed, in nothing but a t-shirt and underwear, editing another video and cursing at iMovie. That was where she normally was, at noon. They used to fight over each other’s definition of work. Jon had thought that, unless it was subject to an ethical review board and involved showing up in loafers and a suit and tie and faking your accent, then it wasn’t real work. Georgie was of the opinion that everything that made you money was real work. 

“Are you drunk at noon?” She said, because she never said hello on the phone. “Seriously, Jon?”

“Do I only call you drunk?” Jon asked, immediately as aggravated as she was. 

“Yes. Did you accidentally drink from Sasha’s spiked thermos?”

“What if I just wanted to see how you were doing?” Wind whistled in the alley, and Jon plugged his ears to block it out. From what he could see inside the propped open door, Martin seemed to be trying to pull up the floorboards. “We’re still friends, aren’t we?”

Georgie sighed, a heavy rush of static over the line. “What’s the problem.”

Jon hated it when people knew him. He _hated_ it. “Martin woke up a few days ago from a parallel reality and he’s saying I’m from his reality too. I don’t know why I believe him. Why do I believe him?”

Georgie hummed, and Jon heard the faint rustling of a keyboard. “That happened to a friend of mine one time. She woke up one day, and started telling everybody that she needed to go back to where everything was shrimp. The next week she didn’t remember any of it. It happens sometimes. Maybe you both just need to get laid. Sorry, I meant he needed to get laid.”

“How much do you have in the pot?” Jon asked flatly. 

“Twenty quid,” Georgie said instantly. “But I have privileged information, which is that _I_ bet on the fact that you’ll never end up together although you both like each other, because you’re still convinced that the reason why we broke up is because you wouldn’t have sex with me.”

“That was why we broke up!” Wasn’t it?

“We broke up because you’re emotionally unavailable and self-obsessed,” Georgie reminded him. “Stop using your sexuality as an excuse. It’s just thing number five hundred and six that you have hang-ups about that you use as an excuse so you’ll never let yourself be happy.”

“You’re really working hard on selling the ‘Martin’s a crackpot and your life is very real and sad’ theory,” Jon said sourly. He was very used to this from Georgie, who was ruthlessly honest in a way that Jon had always admired, but it still stung. 

“Listen, Jon,” Georgie said finally, sighing. “Your life is good for once. You’re out of your shitty house. You haven’t seen your shite family in years. Your flat is nice, you’re living in a great city, you have a nice job and you’re friends with your coworkers. If you want a romantic relationship, Martin is _right there._ You’re just afraid to be happy. You don’t know how to live unless you’re making life difficult for yourself. You’re grasping at straws for a reason why every good thing you have is an awful lie and that everything is secretly awful because saying that everything is good and you still feel bad would involve admitting that you’re a wee bit depressed. It’s shite. Just deal with the fact that the hols are coming up and you don’t know what to get me. It’s a new tripod, by the way. Jot that down.”

“Thanks, Georgie,” Jon said sourly. “You always know just what to say to a bloke. I’ll think of your sage wisdom next time I self-sabotage because I don’t know how to function when not under pressure.”

“You keep telling yourself you thrive under pressure when we both remember how you practically had a mental breakdown over your thesis,” Georgie said, before making kissy noises into the phone. “Ta, darling, I have a call I need to make. Just remember this, alright? If you can’t be satisfied without a crackpot conspiracy theory, then maybe it’s not that you’re the lone voice of truth and hope among a delusional world. Maybe it’s that you _need_ the conspiracy theory, because you need control. You need to pretend you understand. The world is fuckin’ ineffable, Jon. Accept it and revel in it.”

“I do understand,” Jon said sullenly. “I understand everything. And if I don’t understand it now, then - then maybe I can understand it tomorrow. I’m a scientist.”

“You’re a control freak. Come over next week so we can paint each other’s toenails and watch romcoms and I can complain about me and Melanie’s sex life and how Basira and Daisy are really slacking off on our roller derby team. Real ‘bonding with your gay ex’ shite, you’ll love it.”

“I’m aromantic!” 

“You’re biromantic with intimacy issues!”

“What’s the difference!” Jon yelled, and Georgie hung up on him, because she never said hello on the phone and she never said goodbye either. Just like their relationship, then. 

There was a difference, and Jon knew that. The difference was in the glint of sun on Georgie’s curls, and in the soft way Martin smiled at him when he thought Jon was not looking. Jon was not capable of love, and he knew it, but - but maybe that was a delusion. 

What was a delusion, and what was truth? Could Jon wring truth out of the world, like water from a towel? Could he squeeze and twist until the universe rolled over and revealed its ugly insides, and he could _understand?_ Was there any part of himself that was comprehensible? That was worth comprehending? 

In Jon’s world, in the coffee shop where he idled away day after day, many fantastic things happened. Spiders ordered lattes, worms squirmed inside tip jars, and sad looking men predicted the date and time of your death. But that was mundane, and normal, and - and not scary, because Jon understood everything about it. Or was he just used to it? 

There were lots of things in this world Jon didn’t understand that he believed in. Like gravity, or photography. Jon was not a gravity skeptic. He knew how he remained with his feet firmly rooted in their flat Earth, and didn’t fly away. He knew where the moon went when it disappeared from sight. He understood what the stars sung to him, although he did not know how. That was the way of all things, the way of the Entities that controlled their lives with perfectly comprehensible and natural wonder. Jon had been a member of the Cult of the Beholding since he was nine years old, and refused to be part of his family’s Web traditions anymore since their family’s heritage copy of Mr. Spider tried to eat him. It had been the rational choice - when your Entity tried and _failed_ to devour you, it usually meant that you weren’t worthy and that you should find a new patron god sometime quick. He made his goat sacrifices and paid his taxes. He belonged to a society and he believed in that society. He believed that it _worked._ He wasn’t - wasn’t some kind of anarchist, or god forbid an _atheist._

Jon took his life for granted. Jon kept his head down. Jon paid his taxes and didn’t do illegal things and worshipped the Eye. He was a subject of the Queen and a patriot. That was its own kind of truth. 

“I found it!” Martin screamed, “I _found_ it!”

Jon froze, still clutching an unlit cigarette in his other hand. If he craned his head and peered into the shop, he could see Martin hovering over a trap door, frantically pulling it up and releasing a cloud of dust into the air. He could make a decision. He could - he could stop this. He could do the right thing by himself. He could be _happy,_ without qualifiers, without fear, without pain. 

Everybody wanted him and Martin together. Why not? Martin was fine. He was annoying, but if everybody said that they were perfect together then they must be right. Everybody kept on saying that he should get laid, so maybe if he just _got laid,_ then _he wouldn’t be like this -_

But would that be fair? Would that be true? Was truth important, beyond religious contexts? Was it better to know the truth, or was it better to be happy? 

Jon made his decision quickly, if you could even call it a decision. He dropped the cigarette, still unlit, and quickly ran inside the shop. Sasha and Tim were lingering near the entrance to the kitchen, Sasha clearly frightened, Tim strangely angry. Martin was triumphant, even as he coughed and waved away the dust that burst up from the trap door. From where he stood Jon couldn’t see inside, save for the fact that whatever lay underneath the coffee shop, it seemed to be very dark. 

“I found it!” Martin was saying, face shining. “I knew it had to be here somewhere! This is how they were getting in, Martin! The worms were coming in through the trap door.”

“Mate, that makes no sense,” Sasha said from the door, frantically glugging her coffee. Tim was grinding his teeth, for reasons that weren’t clear to Jon. “I bet that thing’s a health hazard. You should close it.”

“You’ll all thank me later,” Martin said. He turned to face Jon, eyes glimmering, and something twisted in Jon’s chest. He tried to imagine kissing Martin, kissing him the way he used to kiss Georgie, and the thought was both revolting and fascinating. Jon didn’t mind kissing, but to Martin - it was just too strange. Bad strange? Or good strange? “Let’s go, Jon. I bet whatever trapped us here is down there. Oh, I should bring a fire extinguisher. Definitely. Do we have one of those?”

“Martin,” Jon said numbly. His tongue felt heavy, his lips felt strange. He walked forward, as if in a daze, and reached out for Martin. Reached for - for what, he couldn’t say. “Martin, forget the trap door.”

“What?” Martin blinked at him, as if he was making a particularly confusing joke. “Jon, this - this is it. Don’t you want to see what trapped us here?”

“I don’t care,” Jon said. It was as if the words were being said by somebody else, as if this decision was not Jon’s own, and so he had no responsibility for it. “I don’t care about the fucking trap door, Martin. I don’t care that we’re trapped _here._ If we’re happy here, so - so what? What was good about your previous life, Martin? What’s so wrong with being here? With me?”

Martin’s eyes were round, and his breath seemed to pick up. Jon reached out again, and this time he really did grab Martin’s hands. They were clammy, and sweaty. 

“I’m sick of getting in the way of my own happiness,” Jon said. “Maybe this - this is a blessing. Maybe this is a _good_ thing. What’s for you at the Institute, Martin? Corkscrews and worms? You can have this instead. We can have us. Just - just forget the trap door. Close the door, Martin. Stay here. I think we can have a future here. Maybe together.”

“Listen to him, Martin,” Tim said. “He can love you here. He’ll never love you at the Institute. You know that, right? He’s too fucked up. This Jon, the Jon right here, is a Jon who can love you back.”

“The Institute was turning Jon into a lunatic,” Sasha said. Her voice was low, slow and almost hypnotic. “You saw him. He wasn’t eating, sleeping, or thinking rationally. He was growing cruel and strange. You were worried about him. Forcing him back into that life would be the worst thing you can do for him. Don’t you like taking care of people, Martin? Don’t you want to take care of Jon? This place is the best place for him. It can be the best place for you too.”

“Martin, I can love you here,” Jon found himself saying. “I can’t love you in real life.”

Martin just stared at him. He glanced at Sasha and Tim, whose faces were blank, but for the most part his gaze was locked solidly on Jon. His lips were moving slowly, as he sometimes did when he was thinking hard. 

Finally, after an agonizing silence, Martin licked his lips and squeezed Jon’s hands where they clasped his. 

“Okay,” he said, before he yanked hard and pulled Jon over the edge of the trap door and into the abyss. 

Everything went dark, and then Jon hit his head. 

  
  
  
  


“ - Jon? Are you paying attention?”

Jon’s vision snapped back into focus. It was as if he had been zoning out - had he been zoning out? - and he had just refocused his eyes and realized where he was. He was sitting in front of Elias’ desk, the familiar office crowding around him. It was neat and clean in every way that Jon’s was dirty and ramped, Elias frowning at him from under his bushy white beard in his tailored gray suit from where he sat behind his oak desk. There was a slim laptop on it, a lot of papers, and little else. 

His mouth felt cottony, and his head ached for some reason. What had happened? How did he get here? Last thing he remembered was Martin - Martin doing something. Jon shook himself. “Sorry. What were you saying?”

Elias sighed, leaning back in his chair. “Jon, do you know why I promoted you? There were other more senior candidates, far more accomplished and mature employees. But I chose you for Head Archivist. Do you know why?”

He did not. He had no idea why he was Head Archivist, but he was afraid of saying so, in case Elias agreed with him and demoted him again. He didn’t know why, but being Head Archivist - it was, it was all he had. “My work ethic?” Jon hazarded. 

Elias barked a laugh. “Funny. No, Jon. It was because you’re faithful.”

“I’m an atheist.”

Elias waved a hand. “Not what I meant. Don’t worry about it. I’ll explain later. But, Jon, you are a dedicated seeker of the truth. You will sacrifice everything, give up your life, just to understand. But, conversely, you have a fine tuned ability to delude yourself. To pretend. To, metaphorically, close your eyes. That’s valuable. I need a Head Archivist who can Comprehend - but, conversely, who can choose what to Believe. Someone who possesses both great rationality and great faith. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

“Not at all,” Jon said honestly, who normally was not honest about that sort of thing. 

“Then don’t concern yourself.” Elias smiled gently under his bushy beard. “Congrats, Jon. You passed your performance review. And I learned a great deal about you. You’re getting a nice raise and a good bonus in the mail soon. I knew I made the right decision hiring you.”

“Thanks,” Jon said numbly, although he didn’t understand why or what had just happened. The coffee shop - a test? Coffee shop? What coffee shop? He never went to any of those things. He preferred his own french press. “Er - how did the others do?”

“Oh, they all passed with flying colors too.” A flash of a scowl cracked across Elias’ face, but in the next second it was gone. “Save Martin. As usual. We’ll have to do something about him.”

“Martin is uniquely incompetent,” Jon agreed. “I’ll talk with him. I’m sure we can make a decent employee out of him yet.”

“Quite. Thank you for your time, Jon.”

He understood the dismissal for what it was, and Jon stood up from his chair. He didn’t understand _quite_ what had just happened, but - well, did he have to? Wasn’t it enough that it was over? 

He was halfway through opening the door to the hallway outside of Elias’ office when it occurred to him. He glanced backwards, watching Elias carefully scratch away at arcane paperwork. “Elias? Are there tunnels underneath the Institute?”

He didn’t look up. “Christ, I hope not. That’s an OSHA complaint waiting to happen. Why?”

“Oh, no reason,” Jon said, already forgetting why he asked. “Good day.”

“Good day, Jon.”

He closed the door behind him with a click and stepped into the hallway. Except the hallway was blackness, and Jon was falling, and he was falling forward so deeply it was as if he was rising, breaking the surface of the water to take a deep gasp of clean air and -

  
  
  


Jon woke up. 

He had fallen asleep at his desk. Again. Fantastic. Jon groaned, mouth feeling full of cotton wool, and weakly licked his lips as he raised his head. He had fallen asleep on a statement. The - oh, the creepy one where the creature in the pot stole that bloke’s marriage. Because obviously. 

Something tingled at the back of his head, and he quickly filed the cassette and statement back in its box. “Wow,” Jon muttered to himself, like a prayer against evil, “what a silly statement. Nothing supernatural about that at all. What nonsense. Ridiculous. Rubbish. Don’t believe that shite at all…”

He hid the statement under five boxes and shoved it in a metal file cabinet, which made him feel marginally better. He exhaled heavily. In the santicity of his own mind, which was not much of a sanctuary at all, he let himself think the Thought Crimes - e.g. that there was _no_ way the statement wasn’t some of the creepiest shite he had read that year and was not made up at all. 

It was strange, how Jon didn’t feel safe in his own mind anymore. It reminded him of his childhood Catholicism, how God always saw your own thoughts and judged you for them. If you thought the wrong thing, you went straight to hell. It felt that way now, in a visceral way that he never had with God - that there really _was_ something watching him, and that if he didn’t please it his life would soon become a living hell. Jon found himself invested in pleasing it. It took so much time and mental energy, it left him with very little energy for pleasing anybody else. 

He should get some more sleep. 

That was when the bane of his existence and the sole human who kept him up at night gritting his teeth and cursing God/Thing That Watches Him When God Refused burst through the door. He was panting, bent over in half with his hands resting on his knees, and he looked at Jon as if he wasn’t quite sure if he was real or not.

“For god’s sake, Martin,” Jon snapped, “haven’t you heard of knocking?”

“I’m sorry I pushed you through a trap door,” Martin screamed, and Jon winced. He didn’t do loud noises. Fuck, maybe Georgie was right and he did have autism. Although he had been convinced that she was stereotyping. “You were being weird and everybody was hitting on me and I panicked and I thought maybe if I like, pushed you both metaphorically and literally you’d snap out of it, but then I had a weird dream where piranhas were eating me and I woke up at my desk, and Sasha looked at me like I was a crazy person again, and -”

“Falling asleep at your desk is not a good look, Martin,” Jon said, grinding his teeth. “Either go back to work or take a sick day. At any rate, if you don’t have anything useful to tell me about the latest statement, get out of my office and let me get some _actual_ work done.”

Martin faltered, looking strangely lost. And oddly - betrayed. “So you - don’t remember?”

“Don’t remember _what_?”

“I - never mind.” Martin sagged, like a balloon with a hole pricked through it that let all the air out. “Never mind. Of course you don’t. Naturally. Because why would anything good happen to Martin Blackwood. I could have taken that job at the _insurance agency,_ but _no,_ Magnus Institute _paid better_ …”

Great. Martin was having another mental breakdown. Must be Tuesday. Wednesday was Jon’s turn, and Tim called Thursdays. Friday’s were anybody’s game. “If there’s nothing else you need...” Jon hinted blatantly. 

“Ah. Yes. Of course. Boss.” Martin saluted, sloppily. “Nothing...nothing strange is happening. That is not usually happening. Because nothing strange ever happens here, according to you. Yep. Adios. I will go do work now. I’ll get right on that.”

“Please leave.”

“Right.” 

Martin closed the door softly behind him, and Jon sighed and pulled out another statement. It was only six, he might as well work for another few hours before trudging home. He could watch an episode or two of that nature documentary series. Make some pasta for dinner, if he felt like it. He might just skip. Then he could go to bed, and wake up at six, and be here all over again in the morning. Just like he did every day. At least since Martin moved into the Archives - he couldn’t exactly crash in that cot downstairs anymore. 

Was his life devoid of meaning? Did he have anything besides work?

Oh, well. It wasn’t that bad. He liked his work. He did. It was meaningful, and what he did was important. He couldn’t complain. Shouldn’t complain. What was the point of complaining?

Jon drew out another statement. It made him feel very watched, and he sighed as he pushed away the laptop again and brought out the clunky old tape recorder. Honestly, he didn’t mind the tape recorder as much as he said he did. When he was in the Institute, late at night, speaking into the recorder...it sometimes felt as if he was talking to an old, dear friend. As if he was never truly alone, so long as he could hear the soft tones of his own voice. As if he was telling a closely guarded secret, straight into an attentive ear. 

All Jon had was himself. And that was all he needed. 

“Statement begins…”

**Author's Note:**

> I'm @ theinternationalacestation.tumblr.com in case you want to ask me what the fuck was with this ending.


End file.
